


Orange

by LeviTamm



Category: Sword Art Online (Anime & Manga)
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Kirito is a Permanent Orange Player
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:13:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 294,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22026883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeviTamm/pseuds/LeviTamm
Summary: Things went a little differently on that first day of the death game. Before Kayaba's announcement, Kirito had PKed another player. An action that permanently changed his cursor to orange. Now he's a criminal. The other players will hunt him down for that. The NPCs will refuse him service. He won't be able to trade with anyone anymore. He was completely alone now. Slight AU.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 78





	1. Orange

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**The cover of this story was made by Slimicee and modified by Myrek to be the right size.**

**A/N:**

**Hi.**

**So I'm trying a bit of an experiment with this story. Whether it's a good idea or not remains to be seen. But here's how it works. I have a Discord server which I'll link below. On this server, I have links to the Google Docs versions of all of the chapters in this story with the permissions set up to allow anyone to comment and suggest edits. This means that you can highlight and comment on specific points in the text.**

**If you come across a part of this story that doesn't feel right or could be made better somehow, and you are willing to spend a moment or two to explain your idea, feel free to point it out. If you make a suggestion, and I accept it, I'll credit your username with the change at the bottom of the chapter. Any sort of comment though is fine. If you just want to talk about a specific paragraph or line, since this site doesn't allow that functionality with the current review system, you can do it this way.**

**I'll periodically re-post the older chapters of this story as they evolve. This story is sort of in the middle of a transformation, so you will likely come across moments where the writing style changes, or is inconsistent with the other chapters. This is especially true in the middle of the story.**

**If you want to just hang out and talk about anything, Discord is also the way to go. Especially for longer, detailed conversations. I've lost track of plenty of reviews and PM's, and I am much more active there than here.**

**This is the link: A3dTszc**

**\- LeviTamm**

* * *

"I'm off to practice!" a voice announced suddenly from the other side of his door.

' _Sugu?'_

Kirito listened silently as the whir of his computer fans filled the air. His sister's footsteps got quieter and quieter down the hallway.

He never answered her. It was alright, though. As far as she knew, he had already linked up and couldn't hear her anyway. It wasn't that far from the truth.

Standing up, he made his way over to his bed and powered up his NerveGear.

He'd use that as an excuse if he were ever pressed on it.

"Link Start."

* * *

This world was wonderful! Every single time he saw it, it took his breath away.

...He could do without the massive crowds of people everywhere, though.

Kirito sighed. It was to be expected. This wasn't the beta test anymore. There were a lot more players now that the full game had been released. This was also the main reason why Kirito found himself navigating through back alleys rather than main roads. It was just too crowded.

He had his whole day planned out. He needed to start levelling as soon as possible. He could already notice how weak and sluggish his body was in comparison to the one he had had in the beta. All of his levels had been rolled back.

He needed that strength back. That speed. And he needed to make sure that he reclaimed his old reputation and position on the leaderboards. It was a trivial thing, but he had been one of the beta's top players—

Just then, and he had no idea how it happened, he miscalculated the position of his feet. His right foot struck the heel of his left as he was running, and he stumbled. Kirito panicked but managed to catch himself before tripping outright.

He slowed to a walk and made sure that his face showed none of the inner turmoil that he felt, playing it off as if nothing had happened.

He had almost publicly embarrassed himself in front of a street full of people. He glanced surreptitiously at the players around him as he continued on, thanking God himself that nobody spared him a second glance. Nobody seemed to have noticed.

It could have been so much worse.

The alley ended, and he made a right turn onto another annoyingly busy street, where he continued at a more sedate pace. Still internally mortified, he didn't dare start running again. Not yet. And nobody on the street paid him any attention. He was just another player minding his own business.

Kirito only started running again after his embarrassment had finally died down and he had rounded the next corner into another alleyway.

Because he had been walking, not running, and didn't stand out as a result, the red-haired man on that very same street never singled him out as a beta tester, and they both continued on their separate ways without ever knowing what might have been.

* * *

Upon signing into the game for the first time as a new player, everyone received 500 cor to pick up their starting supplies. It wasn't that much―only enough for a new player to get a decent setup. It was about fifteen to twenty Boars worth.

Kirito used his to pick up everything a solo player like him needed to start grinding. But he made a bit of an unconventional decision as well. Rather than picking up any food, he picked up some cooking supplies instead. The monsters he would be killing dropped raw meat occasionally, and he didn't need the Cooking skill to successfully cook basic dishes like that, so he wouldn't have to leave the hunting grounds to restock on food. This would save travel time in the long run.

Eating was xp waste, after all.

Efficiency was everything in MMOs. So Kirito intended to cut every last corner that he could. If he had the ability, he wouldn't be eating anything at all. But the hunger pangs generated by the NerveGear were too powerful to ignore.

After picking up his supplies, Kirito glanced down the open road. He had used up the last of his money, and it was about time to get some more.

He was ready to play the game.

* * *

It had only taken him about 10 minutes to get out of the city and into an empty hunting ground. It seemed as if most of the players currently in-game were newer, and hadn't decided to start exploring the combat system quite yet. They would, eventually, but until then, he had almost no competition for decent spots.

The lack of people in the area was a fantastic sight for a solo player like him. Being alone was way better than having to tolerate somebody else nearby.

Sharing a hunting ground was xp waste.

Kirito took a deep breath and sighed.

It was time to start grinding.

When a blue light suddenly appeared in front of him, he was able to recognize it for what it was immediately. A monster spawn. Wasting no time at all, his sword glowed red as he activated a Sword Skill, and he lashed out.

His first kill in-game, a Dire Wolf, didn't even have the chance to fully form before it had shattered into polygons.

Kirito smiled.

He had spawn killed it.

* * *

"Are you kidding me right now?" Kirito asked as he stared in disbelief at the player in front of him.

He hated crashers. He had been grinding for some time by himself, minding his own business, when all of a sudden, some guy had come up out of nowhere and had stolen his kill.

Crashing was the art of observing a lone player fighting a group of monsters and figuring to yourself, _'there's room for me here too,'_ then arriving unannounced, and immediately aggroing half of the monsters in the area. This would utterly ruin the experience rate of the player you had just intruded upon, and make them hate you.

That player is then said to have been crashed.

It bothered him a lot, to say the least. Getting crashed. But normally he wasn't a very confrontational person, so Kirito had decided at first to simply move a distance away and give up his spot without a single word of protest. It was annoying, but he had ultimately decided to just take the hit and move on.

Dealing with and chewing out crashers was xp waste.

But then the guy had followed him. Like, _really_ followed him. At an unreasonably short distance. Not even trying to be discreet about it. It was as if the crasher had taken it upon himself to count just how many hairs were on the back of Kirito's head.

Only then had the crasher's antics finally crossed the threshold of annoyance required for Kirito to spin around and deal with him.

"Something wrong, guy?" the crasher replied in a lazy tone, from less than a foot away.

Kirito could almost smell his breath.

"What do you want?" Kirito asked, fed up with the situation.

There was a moment of silence.

"Are you comin' onto me?" The crasher asked in exchange.

Kirito's eye twitched.

' _So that's how it is, then.'_

It was one of _those_ guys. Someone who just messed with people for no reason at all. Except for their own entertainment, anyway.

A troll.

Kirito had come across a lot of them in the past. Both in other games and the beta test of this one. His go-to strategy in dealing with them was to ignore them and leave. Most of the time, anyway. But even he had a threshold of tolerance. If they kept at it, he'd use his other strategy.

Kirito pinched the bridge of his nose.

He knew this routine and didn't want any part of it.

There were two types of crashers, in his experience. New players who genuinely saw some lone player apparently being surrounded and attacked from all sides, and deciding to intervene, thinking they were being helpful, and the trolls, who did it deliberately just to try to be as annoying as possible to everyone.

Kirito couldn't convince himself to truly hate the new players that did it. Even when they had the balls to crash him, steal half his kills, and then ask questions like 'are you okay?', or when they demanded to be thanked for doing so. They pissed him right off when they did that, no doubt, but he couldn't truly hate them because they were new, and didn't seem to understand what they were doing.

But the trolls…

The ones who did it on purpose…

"You can have this spot, I don't care," Kirito spoke through gritted teeth. "Even though there is nobody anywhere around us, and you could have chosen any other spot in the area... you can have the exact square foot of land that I've been standing on if you really want. But I'm going to go over there if you're over here," Kirito stated with narrowed eyes as he pointed some distance away.

"So don't follow me," Kirito finally turned around and started walking.

_'If he does one more thing,'_ he thought to himself. Things _would_ get messy.

Kirito arrived at his new spot and glanced back in the direction of the other player. Seeing him fighting his own Dire Wolf for once while facing in the opposite direction made Kirito sigh in relief.

It would seem that he had gotten the message across.

Sometimes, very rarely, you could reason with a troll.

You usually had to _reason_ with a sword in your hand and a violent underlying threat, but sometimes… you could do it.

Kirito travelled a bit further out anyway. Just to be on the safe side. The greater the distance between the two of them, in his opinion, the better.

A few more wolves suddenly spawned in the plains in front of him and Kirito immediately engaged the closest one. His aim was a bit off on the first skill he unleashed, putting its HP into the red rather than one-shotting it. He had aimed for one of its weak points, but it had twisted just a tiny amount to avoid the critical hit, totally by chance, at the last instant.

_'No problem,'_ he thought. It happened sometimes. He'd just finish it off with his followup swing―

The monster shattered before Kirito's sword connected.

For just a moment though, he had seen it.

A throwing knife buried hilt-deep into the forehead of the wolf.

_His_ wolf.

Kirito didn't get all the xp for that kill. Only part of it. When multiple players ganged up on a monster and killed it, xp would be shared amongst everyone involved no matter how weak the monster had been or how little was given out upon its death.

Kirito's share had been cut in half. He took a deep breath and looked up towards the sky as he considered his current situation again.

He made a decision. Yes, he was willing to spend the rest of the day as an orange player. His kill had been stolen for the _last_ time. It was time to implement his _other_ strategy for dealing with trolls.

* * *

"You mad, bro?!" the crasher shouted with a cheerful grin plastered across his face.

Another sliver of the player's health was shaved off by a furious, glancing blow.

Kirito thought about the question for a moment.

…

Yeah.

Yeah, he was pretty mad.

The crasher had reduced Kirito's levelling efficiency by a few percentage points. Of course, he was mad.

But Kirito didn't understand this player's confidence. The crasher had yet to do any damage to him. He had anticipated Kirito's violent and immediate response to his actions and had managed to block the first strike, but he had been unable to land any attacks of his own so far.

As soon as the battle had started, Kirito's cursor had changed from green to orange.

There were three known types of cursors that a player could have. Green, orange and orange. Two of those types of cursors looked and functioned almost identically in every way and were even named the same thing, but they differed just enough to be classified as separate types.

It definitely didn't cause any confusion.

All players started with green cursors. If they attacked another player or committed any action deemed a crime in-game, they would change to orange for a period of time depending on what that crime was.

If that crime happened to be killing a green player, however, they would receive the other type of orange cursor that looked no different from the normal one, but that would have different conditions for getting rid of it.

Kirito's cursor was the normal orange variant at the moment, and it'd return to normal after some time had passed if he walked away now. But that wasn't happening.

This was a fight to the finish. And Kirito was going to kill this guy.

Tolerating a belligerent player was xp waste.

He had experienced both ends of PKing in the beta and knew what the consequences would be for his actions. Permanent orange cursors reverted to green only after 24 hours had passed and the player had logged out once.

It was inconvenient having to play the game with one, but it'd be so worth it after he finally sent this idiot back to spawn with nothing but a set of baggy clothes and a handful of pocket change.

When a player died, they were sent back to the starting city with just a fraction of their cor and exactly none of their items, leaving them with nothing but their starting gear. Everything else just dropped to the ground, ready to be picked up by another player.

There was only one rule when things came down to it in this new world. Do whatever you want, and PK anyone that says otherwise. Might makes right in Sword Art Online.

Casually, Kirito batted away another telegraphed and easily readable swing from the other player.

This fight was not at all close, or even fair. The crasher was just barely escaping his attacks. Decent at dodging, but that was all he seemed to be any good at. His offence was lacking, to say the least.

There were a ton of obvious signs that this player was a noob. He had allocated both of his starting skill slots to offensive skills, rather than selecting a support like Searching or Hiding. It was a common mistake for newer players who didn't yet understand that that was bad practice.

Blade Throwing and One-Handed Sword was a bad starting setup in the long term, even if it had advantages in the short term. It would limit the hunting grounds that the player would have access to since they were unable to either hide from enemies or detect them in advance. This would make them much more susceptible to traps and ambushes, and force them to remain in the beginner hunting grounds for much longer than they otherwise would have.

An alternate offensive skill should only be considered after unlocking more skill slots at higher levels. You only started with two, so you had to be careful with which ones you selected. Because if you changed your mind and decided to swap out an old skill for a new one, you would lose all progress in it.

Experienced players understood these concepts well. But after glancing at the massive holes in this player's defence, Kirito was able to see that clearly, this player wasn't very experienced. Which was a shame. A part of him had actually been impressed at the accuracy behind that blade throw from earlier―the one that had stolen his kill.

This crasher had a lot to learn though.

The player dodged another sequence of Kirito's sword skills, before getting into another blade lock. The familiar sound of two blades crashing into each other echoed throughout the area, and a set of sparks were produced as they scraped against each other after the impact.

Kirito almost grinned.

This guy just didn't learn.

He punched the crasher in the face with his free hand, taking great satisfaction in wiping away the smug smirk that had just been there a moment ago.

This was the third time Kirito had done that, and still, the crasher had not figured out how to stop it from happening.

A fight couldn't be won like this. You needed more than just defence and dodging. And you wouldn't win by trying to get into awkward blade locks that you saw all the time in anime.

Kirito's sword glowed a bright violet as he queued up another skill. He fully expected it to be his final move.

To win, you had to attack.

The end of the fight was marked by the sound of shattering glass.

* * *

Kirito let out a content sigh. It had been so satisfying, taking all of that guy's gear and money. He'd almost call it therapeutic. PKing on lower floors, especially in the early game, could be very lucrative. Players dropped pretty much everything in their inventory when they died, gear and money. Unless they happened to be in a party at the time, anyway. Then there was an exception.

Their items would be transferred into a shared party inventory instead, which allowed everyone to get their stuff back upon respawning as long as there was a single surviving party member. Most players as a result, especially early on, would form these parties due to such clear and obvious advantages. Especially with PKing being so incentivized early on. When you killed a party-less player in the early game, you essentially doubled your assets, as everyone had the same initial wealth. It wasn't until later on in the game, when players started to specialize and wealth inequality started to kick into high gear where there existed some players too poor to kill.

But that player hadn't been in a party. He had lost everything he had had, and Kirito had taken it all.

Kirito smiled. Therapeutic was the perfect word for it. It was karma. It was simply what that player deserved for trying to annoy him like that. For being a new player trying to look down on someone with more experience. For trying to steal his kills.

It was an unwritten rule amongst experienced players in MMOs everywhere. You don't do that. People that did were killed so fast in the beta by the front line clearers. They had been ruthless about it too, often humiliating the perpetrators in some fashion first.

Kirito had actually been polite to that guy, all things considered, giving him a single chance to leave on his own accord. Not many elite beta testers would have given him that same chance.

Maybe that idiot would even learn something from this experience.

* * *

Kirito wasn't disturbed again until the sky started turning orange and the sun started setting. A part of him had expected that crasher to show up again to try and bother him, but thankfully, he never did. Trolls were usually repeat-offenders, so this came as a relief.

Kirito had levelled up in the meantime and was well on his way to level 3, now. Which wasn't bad for a single day. That PK had given him a surprisingly good chunk of experience. He didn't intend to go PKing new players any time soon, though. He rarely PKed at all in the first place, only making exceptions in a handful of cases.

The extra experience was nice, though.

He had left one of his two skill slots open. He had it narrowed down between either Searching or Hiding but he hadn't figured out which to choose yet. Both were extremely useful, and he would probably end up with both in the end, either way, but he had decided to wait until he had a long-term goal decided before picking up his second skill.

There was just too much to consider in the meantime.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a loud ringing sound echoed across the plains. It was periodic, and he couldn't quite pinpoint its direction. It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Before he could determine what it was, he was enveloped by a blue light, and forcefully teleported.

* * *

That announcement had utterly ruined his state of mind.

_'Kayaba.'_

It all made sense. Everything he had said was possible. A death game with 10,000 players. If anyone in the world could pull that off, it was Akihiko Kayaba.

If you died even once in the game, you died for real.

It did not take him very long at all to understand the implications of this.

He had killed someone earlier. Just a few hours ago. That person, that crasher, whoever it had been, had never opened his eyes again. Had never woken up. A few moments after their fight had concluded, that person's brain had been fried by the NerveGear.

...All while Kirito had gloated over the spoils of his victory and celebrated the player's death.

That person was dead.

Kirito had grinned and cheered.

He paused for several moments to let these revelations fully sink in.

He felt sick.

Suddenly, the crowd around him started to panic. There were shouts of anger, desperation, and disbelief, all directed at the spot Akihiko Kayaba's giant avatar had once been. And the sound dragged Kirito out of his thoughts.

This was real.

A text box suddenly opened in his field of view. It declared that he was an orange player in a safe zone and that the city guards would mobilize if he didn't leave the area immediately. He had seen the message before in the beta. It was a warning given out to orange players that tried to enter a city's safe zone. They weren't allowed in. They couldn't set foot in any main city on any floor without being attacked by guards.

Those guards were strong, too. And they kept respawning. If he stayed where he was now, he'd die. Without a doubt. Guards were the only monster in the game that could damage a player in a safe zone.

Faced with this imminent danger, he forced his emotions to the back of his mind and tried his best to look at his situation objectively. He knew that if he hesitated now, he would die.

He needed to get out of the city.

While the crowd was in hysterics, Kirito spun and bolted towards the closest city gate.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Haley Dill, Eiri Fllyn**


	2. Horunka Village

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

He chugged another health potion as he was nearly insta-killed for the third time in thirty seconds.

All thoughts of this being a death game, about recently killing someone, about the crowd at the plaza―who were oblivious to the current situation he was in―and about everything else, had been wiped from his mind. He had allowed his instincts to take full control.

They were the only thing keeping him alive.

He had made a beeline from the plaza to the closest entrance, but it had been too far to get to in time. The spawn timer for the guards had been designed to only allow enough time for orange players to get out of the city from near the edge of it. Not from the center plaza. It was normally impossible to even make it that far into the city as an orange player at all. He had only managed it because he had been teleported there.

So whether Kayaba had meant to or not, by teleporting all the players to the main square like that he had massively screwed Kirito over in an incredibly unfair way that could potentially cause him to die.

Sure enough, time had run out before he made it out of the city, and the guards had spawned.

They were outrageously strong, and just as fast as he was. Kirito was only level 2. This meant that a single direct hit from them would kill him, and even a glancing blow could be enough. He was completely dodging their attacks, electing to not even try to parry them with his sword, and he was still almost dying from the AOE damage.

The guards were using simple swords and shields and were dressed like typical knights. Their appearances were misleading, however. As they could run as fast as he could while in full plate armour.

And there he was with a basic leather vest.

His original escape route had been blocked off, so he had had to change his plan on the fly. He knew the city pretty well though and was currently making his way down an alleyway towards his second, backup escape route.

The other entrances of the city were way too far away to even consider. And the longer he took to get out, the more dangerous his situation would become. More guards would spawn if the system found out that an orange player was still in the area after the original wave of guards had been sent out.

It had been tested in the beta once. Kirito hadn't been in the operation himself, but he had heard about it the day after. Some college dropout had organized a group of fifty orange players one day and had led them all into the Town of Beginnings to cause as much pandemonium as possible until the guards had shown up. The goal had been to see how they worked and to see if they could be killed.

A few things had been learned from that.

The guards could be killed, but it was pretty much meaningless to do so, as they dropped no xp, cor, or items, and new ones would spawn in immediately to take their place.

The spawn rate increased over time. If this was still not enough then the guards would all increase in strength and get more HP soon after. The system would essentially keep on buffing the guards every couple of minutes without limit until there were no more orange players left inside the safe zone.

It was a completely overpowered mechanic that could not be fought against. But that was the point. Orange players were simply not meant to be inside the main cities for any significant period. And Kirito could only guess that the developers had wanted to impose this restriction in a passably realistic way, preferring to use in-game NPC guards as enforcement rather than creating some kind of invisible barrier around the city that only non-orange players could pass through.

Back during this experiment, every single player that had taken part in it had been wiped. To be fair, this was mostly due to their refusal to retreat. The guards did start weak enough to escape from, so those players could have run away if they had wanted to. But they didn't. They had decided to fight right down to the last man. So they had all been killed.

Kirito could still avoid that fate. And all he had to do to do so was run.

There were only four guards after him at the moment, all of whom were right on his heels. But he only had about a minute more at the most before another batch would spawn. If his next idea didn't work, it was over for him.

Up ahead on the left, he knew that there was an alleyway that had a staircase in it leading up to the rooftops.

There had been a group of players back in the beta that had frequently used this route for racing across the city. With access to the rooftops, they would leap from building to building emulating some of the feats you could normally only see in the movies or in anime. Just messing around and having a good time with the movement mechanics of the game.

He had taken part in some of that himself. But this time, rather than doing it for fun, Kirito needed the added movement options to survive.

Finally arriving at the alley, he turned down it and sprinted up the staircase.

He had a plan.

One of the buildings on this route, he knew, was tall enough to allow a player to jump to the top of the surrounding city wall from it. But only if they had a high enough AGI stat. You typically needed to be at least around level 8 or 9 to have the minimum stats required for it. It was an easy feat if you were, but in his brand new avatar, it shouldn't have been possible for him to clear it conventionally.

But he had a trick up his sleeve.

A sword skill.

It was possible to surpass a player's normal jumping range by using one. If you activated one with a long reach in a particular way as you were jumping, the velocities would add together, propelling you further through the air than normal. Kirito happened to have one such skill unlocked. The timing was a bit tricky, but he had effectively mastered the art of _skill jumping_ ―the term that the beta testers had coined for the technique.

But he first had to get to the right spot.

Kirito started sprinting and jumping across the rooftops with the guards right behind him. The whole situation immediately reminded him of a chase scene that you might find in a movie or an anime. Complete with flips, crazy jumps spanning entire alleyways and streets, and other extreme parkour stunts. He was filled with adrenaline and was on his A-game.

But the guards were still able to keep up with him. They were ridiculously mobile and seemed to suffer no penalties for their heavy armour and equipment.

Kirito's strategy was very high-risk. Once he committed to making it to this particular building he was aiming for, failure was no longer an option. There were only a handful of exits to the city at ground level and the building he was trying to get to was roughly halfway between the two closest ones. In other words, the direction he was travelling in was taking him further and further away from the closest gatehouse.

The moment he had made this decision, he was faced with the reality that he would either make it on top of the city wall with a skill jump on his first try, or he would die. There was no middle ground. There wasn't enough time to fail the jump and make it to a gate after.

The streets below him gradually filled up with guards. Before he knew it, there were 20 or 30 of them. If he messed up any jump along his route, he'd fall and land on the ground below, right in the middle of a group of guards and die.

Thankfully, however, only the four guards right behind him had managed to make it up to the rooftops fast enough to have an actual chance of closing the gap. So Kirito could mostly ignore all the other ones for now, since they wouldn't make it up to him before he made it to the building he was trying to get to.

After another two more jumps over two more alleyways, Kirito finally made it to the building he was trying to get to.

It was on the opposite side of the street.

Kirito leaped over and across the entire width of the road and landed on the wall of the building, clinging onto a windowsill and a piece of piping. He was about three stories up, but he needed to get higher. He was on the wall of the tallest building in the city, the only known seven-story building―a watchtower of some sort. It was only surpassed in height by the spires surrounding the Black Iron Palace back at the city's main square. But those weren't buildings you could enter so they didn't count.

Kirito scrambled up the side of the building as fast as he could. He had been there before, so his hands and feet quickly found the familiarly-placed handholds and footholds as he climbed.

He vaulted onto the roof once he was high enough. Once he was on his feet again, he chanced a single glance behind him and promptly started to panic.

The group of NPC guards were no casuals, so a pesky thing like gravity wouldn't keep them down. They utterly _took off_ after him, easily leaping four storeys into the air without a problem.

Now, Kirito understood that the stats of the NPC guards were through the roof, but it was another thing entirely to see how unfair and broken they were in-person.

He turned and sprinted towards the opposite side of the building and prepared to use the technique.

Behind him, he heard several other guards land on the roof as well, having jumped up from ground level. In the few seconds he had spent climbing, the guards who had been following along from the ground had caught up to them and had taken the opportunity to surround the building.

Many of them were now jumping onto the roof.

Seven storey hops were nothing for them.

But hopefully, it wouldn't matter, as Kirito was now where he needed to be.

Whether or not he'd live or die would depend on how well he could execute this technique.

With the guards right behind him, Kirito made it to the ledge of the building, right across from the city wall. It was the last gap he needed to clear.

He was at roughly the same height as the top of the wall itself. However, there was nothing to grab onto. The walls were unclimbable. So to make it to the top, Kirito would have to clear the gap and remain high enough at the end of the arc of his jump to grasp the top ledge with his fingers. If he couldn't do that, he'd smash into the wall, slide down, and die.

The distance itself was worrying as well. Now that he was here again in-person, Kirito quickly realized that the gap itself didn't look clearable. It was too far. In his memories of the beta, he had remembered the wall looking a lot closer.

An unsettling feeling went through him.

' _Did I just screw up and die?'_

But there was no turning back. He was already sprinting at top speed and he needed every last drop of forward momentum that he could get his hands on to maximize the range of his jump.

Kirito closed his eyes for a brief moment and threw aside all his thoughts, focusing entirely on the technique.

Opening them again, he carefully spaced his final three steps so that on his last one his foot landed precisely on the top corner of the building's ledge. He activated Sonic Leap, aiming it at a 45-degree inclination. He didn't target anything in particular with it, aiming somewhere high above the city's outer wall.

Then he jumped.

He was in the air for almost three seconds.

Thankfully, however, he had a bit larger of an error margin than he had initially thought. He managed to make contact with the top of the wall at shoulder height. So he had not needed to pull any last-instant, super-dramatic maneuvers to leave him hanging by his fingertips alone or anything like that. Instead, he was able to get both arms on top of the wall from the get-go and from there, it was easy enough to pull himself up.

That skill jump had been sloppily executed due to the pressure the guards had placed him under, but it had been good enough. He hadn't choked.

Once again demonstrating that gravity itself was selective of who it decided to affect, the guards caught an updraft or something and fluttered through the air―gliding to a stop behind him with all the grace of a helium balloon.

Kirito was nearly home free, though. All the hard parts were behind him. The edge of the safe zone was now within his grasp. There was just one last thing to do.

He ran to the edge of the wall and jumped off.

He was in the air for quite some time due to his height above the ground, but his feet eventually hit and he rolled.

Rolling to distribute the impact force of a fall worked in the game just as it did in real life. Fall damage normally increased exponentially the longer you were in the air, but when you rolled, the game registered the impact as two or more distinct hits, rather than one large one. And those few distinct hits _combined_ did less damage overall than one single impact would have.

The result was that he had been able to survive the fall that would have otherwise killed him. Though his health was in the red once again afterwards.

Somewhere between seven and ten stories was the limit for the highest distance you could drop from at his level without being killed instantly. Whether you ended up on the high end or the low end of that range depended entirely on how you landed.

He found himself seated on the ground outside the city a moment later, staring at his HP gauge.

He'd normally drink another potion, but his timer was currently on cooldown. So he'd have to wait a bit first. The mechanic was meant to stop the spamming of health potions and made the game significantly more difficult, but he understood why it was there.

Kirito let out a sigh of exhaustion and relief before glancing up at the top of the wall he had just jumped from.

He counted fifteen guards on the ledge staring back down at him. They stood there watching him for a few moments before turning away and slowly disappearing back over the wall and out of view.

They stopped chasing him. The guards couldn't leave the safe zones of main cities so he was safe. He had made it out.

He was still alive. Somehow.

His plan had worked.

But it did make him briefly wonder about something. How many other players had just been screwed over like that? If anyone else in the game had been an orange player before that forced teleportation, for any reason, they would have been inside the main plaza for that announcement, too. So the guards would go after them as well.

Was he the only one in the game so far who was orange? Or was there someone else out there just like him, fighting for their lives at that very moment? How many wouldn't make it out?

He took the next few minutes to try and catch his breath and process everything.

Then slowly, he climbed up to his feet and started running towards the next village.

He needed to focus now. He couldn't delay any longer. The moment he stopped focusing on his immediate future, he would fall into a state of despair exactly like the one he had seen in the crowd back at the plaza. He could already hear some of those dark thoughts whispering at the back of his mind and he couldn't let himself stop and listen to them.

' _Focus.'_

* * *

' _Don't stop. Don't you dare stop…'_ The moment he slowed down and started thinking, he knew that he would probably break down. The sheer weight of everything that had happened would crush him.

All he knew was that he wanted to live and that he was facing a massive disadvantage. Some of the extra dangers he'd face in the future had shown up in his thoughts, during his trip.

The other players would probably try to kill him on sight. It happened to orange players back in the beta, but now that death was real, he'd be facing universal and absolute hatred, unlike anything he had ever seen before. He'd probably even be actively hunted. Players would band together and hunt down people like him. Orange players.

Criminals would be seen as so much worse now that it wasn't just a game anymore. He'd never be able to purchase supplies from an NPC shop. He wouldn't be able to repair his weapons either unless he acquired the Blacksmithing skill and did it himself. So, he would have to keep acquiring new weapons as the old ones broke.

No player would trade with him. Because in the official trade windows of the game, they'd see his cursor and brand him as a criminal immediately. Players couldn't hide their cursors during these sorts of interactions. If you were trading with someone, that person's name and cursor would be visible to you on your menu.

That meant that he couldn't buy anything. He was completely isolated and would have to depend solely on himself for everything.

Every other player was a threat to him. And if he wanted to survive, he'd have to treat them as such. He'd have to stay away from crowds, and he'd have to live entirely on his own and entirely self-sufficiently.

He couldn't hide in a safe zone, where he'd be seen by players or attacked by guards. And the smaller villages without guards in them weren't an option either because he'd still be unable to rent an inn. NPCs refused orange players those services. Nowhere was safe for him. Even desperate measures like sleeping in a back alley or on a rooftop were too risky, as all it would take is one player to spot him in the middle of the night while he was asleep for everything to be over.

This meant that he had to live in total isolation from everyone, and in dangerous territory. The only option he had was to live on the front lines and become the absolute strongest player in the game. He had to be strong enough to defend himself against the hordes of players that would try to kill him in the future.

It was quite literally, him against the world.

He could only hope that the quest in Horunka Village that gave the Anneal Blade as a reward would still be available to him. If it wasn't, he wouldn't know what to do. That was the best sword he could get, realistically, on the first floor. There were better ones on the rare drop tables, but that was all RNG based, and most ultra-rare swords from there had much higher STR requirements than he could meet. So even if he got one, it wouldn't be equippable for a long time.

In his situation, there existed such a thing as a weapon that was too good to be useful. So it was pretty much Anneal Blade or bust. If he couldn't get that, he'd have to figure something else out.

But even that wasn't the end of his problems either. Because no matter what sword he ended up getting, it would eventually degrade into nothing due to his inability to repair it.

If he picked up the Blacksmithing skill, he'd waste a skill slot on it which would prevent him from picking up a more useful skill like Searching.

But if he did not pick up Blacksmithing, he would never be able to hold onto a high-quality weapon for any significant period. So he'd be stuck rotating through average quality weapons indefinitely.

Either way, his DPS suffered. But it would take some careful, in-depth analysis to figure out what the lesser of the two evils was.

Every single choice in the development of his character had to be extensively planned out like this. He would have to optimize everything as best as he could. And it was going to take hours upon hours of intense planning and there would be nobody there to help him out. There would be nobody to communicate with to share ideas, and there would be no information to reference.

He was completely, utterly alone.

But all of this planning was for the future. For now, he would take things one step at a time. He first needed to see if he could get that sword. The Anneal Blade. If he couldn't, then he'd have bigger, more pressing concerns to deal with than what skills to pick up.

So he needed to talk to that quest NPC. If he was able to accept the quest, then he was pretty sure that he would be able to complete it with the equipment he currently had on him.

He hadn't counted them all yet, but he knew that he had a couple of swords in his inventory. They were basic ones, but they were better than nothing. And the combined durability across all of these weapons should be enough by his estimate to tide him over until the end of the quest.

But no matter if he could take the quest or not, there was one thing that he did know with absolute certainty.

As Kirito sprinted down the road towards Horunka Village, he opened up his menu and allocated his currently empty second skill slot to the most beneficial skill he had access to in his current situation.

Hiding.

Searching was useful, and that had been his second skill back in the beta, but he was going to be living outdoors for the foreseeable future and he needed some way to prevent monsters from attacking him while he was asleep.

Hiding had a lot of useful features that would allow him to do that and that made it the most useful skill in his current situation. He'd have to save Searching for his next unlock at level 6.

This plan also avoided a potential pitfall. Because it was unlikely that he'd make it all the way to level 6 after just one day of grinding, if he chose Searching first he'd be stuck in the wilderness at the end of the day, dead tired, and with nowhere to go.

Simple mistakes like this, ones that would normally be tolerable to a green player, could easily get him killed now.

Hiding was his best shot at making it to the next day alive. He needed to be able to find a spot at the end of the day with no monster spawns so that he could activate Hide―the Hiding skill modifier that allowed him to vanish from the views of most low-levelled monsters and players. Theoretically, he should be able to get some sleep that way, hidden from any threats.

There was just so much that he had to plan out now because of his damn cursor.

All of his extra problems were caused by the simple fact that he couldn't assume that his orange cursor would go away after a day had passed, anymore. In the beta, after 24 hours, a player's cursor would reset to green only after the next logout. Normal orange cursors didn't require a logout to reset, but the special ones obtained from a PK did. And the way things were looking, unless the rules had changed, it was unlikely he'd have his cursor reset to green ever again.

Because there was no way to logout.

' _If only I hadn't killed that Crasher…'_

He could only hope that his cursor would reset. If it did, all of his extra problems would vanish, and then he could just focus on clearing the game like everybody else.

Then he'd only have to deal with the crippling guilt that was gnawing away at him from the inside.

* * *

How he'd be treated by everyone in the game didn't really register to him until he heard the change in dialogue from the quest NPC.

Quests were way different when you were orange. Kirito had predicted the change in advance but seeing it himself in person was something else.

It hurt a lot more than he expected it to. Even though he knew that the woman was an NPC, hearing the hatred in her voice directed squarely at him for being a criminal was hard to deal with.

It felt unnecessary. Why would anyone code a game like this? On some level, he knew that getting all worked up and bent out of shape due to being berated by a robot was silly. But it still made him feel like a piece of shit and he couldn't turn that part off no matter how hard he tried to.

He had never been so openly hated before so he didn't know how to react. The woman had been so friendly when he had taken the quest back in the beta as a green player. But now she said that the only reason she was letting him help her at all was that she was desperate and didn't have any other choice. Her daughter was sick and would die if she didn't get a special type of medicine made from the ovule of a monster known as a Little Nepenthe. And Kirito was her only hope for that.

But she made sure to tell him that she thought he was a horrible person.

So the quest was the same. The only changes to it that the devs had made for orange players were simply there to make him feel like an asshole.

The woman's hopeful smile that he was so familiar with was nowhere to be found. Instead, she was snarling at him and frothing at the mouth and that made Kirito sad. Angry, too. Because he just couldn't get past it and it shouldn't have been a big deal. He shouldn't have cared. But he did.

Without a word, and wanting to get out of the situation as quickly as possible, Kirito accepted the quest and made his way into the woods to start looking for the ovule.

* * *

There were three basic types of Nepenthes that spawned at different rates.

First, there was the normal type that spawned the vast majority of the time. The vast majority of all Nepenthes were of this type and there was nothing special worth noting about them.

Then there was the first of the two special Nepenthe variants that dropped the ovule he was looking for. They spawned extremely rarely and could be distinguished by the red flower on their heads. In the beta, it was common for players to have to kill well over a hundred normal Nepenthes before one with a flower would finally show up.

Finally, there was the third type of Nepenthe. The second, special type. While they were much less common than the normal ones, they were slightly more common than the ones that dropped the ovule. So this type sat somewhere between the other two, though Kirito would not be able to pin down precisely where. Nobody had ever done any frequency analysis on Little Nepenthe spawn rates and how they varied across types and nothing had ever been confirmed by the devs so there wasn't any reliable information out there. In any case, Nepenthes of this variant had a dangerous ability. They had a special type of fruit on their heads that when damaged, would pop and produce a scent that radically increased the Nepenthe spawn rate in the area for a short time, and attracted all the ones nearby.

At his level, level 2, that would almost certainly be a death sentence. As the Nepenthes were all level 3.

Normally, it would be suicidal to do this quest at such a low level because the strength difference between levels was at its largest in the early game. A level 3 player was noticeably stronger than a level 2. But a level 50 player, for example, was barely stronger than a level 49. And that just had to do with the way that numbers worked. There was nothing hard-coded in the game to make it like that. The number 3 was simply 50% bigger than 2 while 50 was only about 2% bigger than 49, despite both integers being only one apart from their neighbours. Although it was a bit more complicated than that in-game as strength progression wasn't linear, this concept was reflected throughout a player's stats.

Because of this, the Nepenthes only one level above him were actually pretty damn hard to kill. If you ignored all the differences between players and monsters and oversimplified the situation, they could be seen as monsters that were 50% stronger than him. That was a lot. He'd be able to manage, but only by going for critical hits and by making use of his extensive prior knowledge of the quest from the beta.

And he would be heavily reliant on luck. He expected that he would need to kill around 100 or so to find an ovule. But, depending on his luck, it could either be much higher or much lower. There was no avoiding that. There were no clever workarounds to make that number smaller. Monsters in the game did not despawn in a way that could be taken advantage of.

All videogames, whether they were VRMMOs with massive amounts of computation power behind them or not, took advantage of every trick imaginable to free up system resources and SAO was no different. If no player was in an area, there was no reason for that environment to be rendered, so everything inside it, NPCs and monsters included, would despawn until something approached the area again.

An idea that one could test in Kirito's situation, then, would be to walk over to the Nepenthe spawning grounds, get a bunch of them to spawn into the game, and then run off somewhere immediately. After going out of range, assuming no other player was in the area either, all the Nepenthes would despawn. Then you could run back to get a new set of Nepenthes into the game. By repeating this procedure over and over again, you could keep causing new Nepenthes to spawn and hope to get lucky with one of them being the ovule variant.

But tricks like this didn't work. The devs had thought about these sorts of things and had taken countermeasures in advance. The game remembered which specific Nepenthes despawned and even kept track of where they decided to move even when they weren't loaded.

So there was no option to avoid combat. To get new Nepenthes to keep cycling into the game, and to keep throwing those dice, hoping for an ovule, Nepenthes had to die and he would have to kill them. There was a cap on the number that could be spawned into the game at any one time so if they weren't killed, that specific set of Nepenthes would stay in the area forever. And because nobody would ever team up with him, Kirito would have to do all of this fighting by himself.

He really hoped his luck was good. The way he saw it, he had used up way more than his daily quota of bad luck and had built up some karma. He had to have.

But he was still going to be there for a while. Back in the beta when he had originally taken this quest, he had been much higher-levelled at the time. So the Nepenthes had been much easier to kill than they would be now. Other than being annoying, this had a consequence to it.

He would have to expend more equipment durability per kill than he was strictly comfortable with.

And he had a hard limit on that. He could not repair any of his equipment. So even if he was unbelievably careful and cautious in maximizing his equipment durability, using techniques in combat that were maximally efficient in that respect, there were only so many Nepenthes that he could kill before all of his stuff would break. If he had not completed the quest by then, then he wouldn't know what to do.

There weren't any stores that he could restock at. So where was he going to find another sword if all of his broke?

Due to all of these restrictions, he needed to come up with some sort of optimal strategy. Kirito needed to maximize the number of unique Nepenthes that he saw while minimizing the number he had to kill directly.

There were two options for this that he could think of. The first was to hide somewhere and wait, allowing other players to start this quest and then steal the first ovule that showed up, making them do all the work for him.

But this idea was immediately discarded. And it wasn't only because it would make him feel like a bigger dirtbag than he already felt. He had a practical reason, too.

He needed to progress as quickly as humanly possible. He needed to remain ahead of all the other players and the only way to do that was to be on the cutting edge. He could not afford to sit around and wait for other players to catch up to him. So waiting for another player to get an ovule for him wasn't a good idea if he had a way to do it faster.

This left him with his other plan. It was a bit weird and unexpected, but now that he was attempting to speedrun this quest, it made sense.

If a player travelled to a Nepenthe spawn point, they would find somewhere around 10 Nepenthes immediately. That was the average number that tended to linger closeby and didn't wander too far off. There would be more if the player kept looking, but they would be increasingly harder to find the further out you needed to go from the center of each spawn point.

Kirito also knew where all of these main hotspots were and had marked them on his map. So if he intended to rotate between them all, he could estimate his travel time between them pretty accurately.

After taking a close look at his map and taking a few measurements, this had left him with a strange realization. Because he knew how much time it would roughly take for each kill, his original plan wasn't optimal.

Finding a single Nepenthe spawn point and locking it down wasn't the best use of his time. Not at first, anyway. It was slightly more optimal to travel to all the different spawn points first, before killing anything.

Kirito could travel to each spawn point and see if any ovuled Nepenthes were already there faster than he could kill the set at any given location.

To maximize the number of unique Nepenthes that he saw in a given period, running around the forest to find them all was faster than killing a bunch of them and allowing new ones to replace the old.

The time it would take to go from one hotspot to the next was roughly the same as the amount it would take for him to kill 5 or 6 Nepenthes. It varied a bit based on the geography of the area, but that was about the average.

But since each spawn point had around 10 immediately visible Nepenthes on average, this new strategy was almost twice as fast.

...Provided that he didn't stick around at any spawn point for too long. If he ran into the middle of each spawn point and took a quick glance around the area only to immediately take off again. Because it would provide diminishing returns if he continued his search beyond that.

So this strategy involved finding around 75% of all the Nepenthes that were already in the forest in this systematic way before doing any fighting and ignoring the rest that required a little too much effort to find.

This idea was only optimal once, though. After finding the majority of the Nepenthes like this there would be no further benefit in continuing to run around. As new ones would only begin showing up after he started killing them. So there was a cutoff point where the optimal strategy would suddenly switch from searching to fighting. Because he wasn't trying to optimize the number of kills. He was trying to optimize the number of unique Nepenthes that he sees. And that was different.

This idea would give him 60-80 freebies without him ever needing to fight anything. This would conserve his equipment durability and if he was lucky, it would be much faster.

It would, however, lose him out on a little bit of xp as he would be spending quite a bit of time just running around instead of fighting. But grinding with his current equipment wasn't a good strategy in the long run anyway, so it didn't matter. He would end up much further ahead by getting a better weapon first even if he wasn't fighting anything in the interim.

The sheer size of the DPS increase given by the Anneal Blade would offset the xp loss of not grinding for now. In the long run, getting that weapon faster was better than getting stronger.

This plan of his, however, assumed that there was no other player in the area complicating matters.

* * *

Kirito sighed in disappointment after visiting his last spawn point.

He hadn't found a single special Nepenthe. Neither ovuled nor fruited. But he hadn't seen any other players, either. So that was good news.

But now, according to his plan, the optimal strategy changed. He was going to have to fight.

He really hoped that it would spawn soon. Because his character's stats were so low, if he had to kill another eighty or more Nepenthes, he would be there for a long time.

It was all down to RNG, now.

He glanced around at the purple cursors of the Nepenthes around him, and prepared his sword, hoping that he wouldn't be there too long.

Then he attacked.

* * *

The Nepenthes had very large critical hit zones. They were essentially giant plants walking around on their roots, with two vines that they used as whips, and a large human-like mouth with teeth and lips. Their body was very large and easy to hit, and their main weak spot was in the dead center of the body.

He found that with his basic sword, hitting nothing but weak points, he could kill the Nepenthes in three strikes on average. They were generally pretty easy kills as long as he avoided the vines. If he did end up getting hit though, he'd take some significant damage. Particularly if he was hit by their special attack.

The Nepenthes could spit a corrosive liquid from their mouths that did damage over time if he were to be hit by it. But before spitting, they performed a specific animation that made the attack predictable.

All in all, he had no problem killing them as long as he avoided their attacks and didn't rush. And now that he was getting used to killing them again―as it had been a while since he had fought one―his kill times were gradually decreasing. They had started at around forty seconds per kill but had fallen significantly as his efficiency improved.

And efficiency was all that mattered. It served two purposes in this case. It would allow more Nepenthes to cycle into the game, faster, which would cause the ovule to spawn quicker, and it would also get him faster xp.

Grinding sessions all came down to experience per hour. Killing Nepenthes faster meant more xp in less time, and reaching the next level sooner than a less efficient player would over the same period.

To stay on top, all the best players had to constantly think in these terms. If they slipped up on their efficiency even once, the next best player that did not slip up during that same time would take over.

The top of the leaderboards was a very cruel and unforgiving place to find yourself. One tiny mistake and you'd never find yourself in the number one spot again. Early game advantages were huge because everything compounded over time.

It wasn't an iron-clad rule, but a general principle existed that stated that the more xp you had, the faster you would be able to get more. It was due to exponential growth. Generally speaking, if you got more xp, faster, you would have access to higher-levelled methods in getting more, sooner. There was a knee in the curve where xp rates really started to pick up, and the sooner you reached it, the further ahead you would be.

He had read something once in an anonymous internet comment that had really solidified this idea in his head. At any given moment there was an integer representing the total number of players that are stronger than you. At the beginning of the game, that number is zero, because everyone starts in the same place. But if you stagnate at the start while others do not, this number will increase drastically for you as time goes on.

But for the players who had been on the cutting edge the whole time, right from day one, that number would always remain close to zero. There would never be a point in the game's history where they found themselves seriously outclassed by others.

Since these players posed massive potential threats to Kirito due to his cursor, he wanted them to be, at worst, no stronger than himself. Especially since these sorts of players would be the ones making the rules later on in the game because everything always devolved into a 'might makes right' mentality. So, the closer this integer remained to zero for him, the better the odds of him surviving until the end of the game would be. And that left him with no other choice.

There was only a finite amount of time in which to gain xp. As long as the game may last, everyone's time inside was limited. By either death or victory. Everyone who made it to the end of the game would have had the same amount of time to develop their strength. Anyone that did not capitalize on every opportunity they had in the early game, would never reach the top because there would always be others that did. There would be no catching up if you fell behind. Not unless the person you were chasing faltered. Because while you were trying to close the gap, they were still pulling away. And they would be going faster than you because they had been working hard right from the start and reached the knee of the experience curve before you. To even have a chance, you would have to make up all that ground―probably through exploiting some fundamental discovery that they had not had access to.

The point was, there is only that one single window on the first day of the game. And not taking it was the same as moving backwards.

Whoever the strongest player in the game ended up, one thing was sure. They had hit the ground running right from the opening seconds of the game.

This was why he could not rest. He planned to continue pressing forwards as hard and as fast as he could until he was either exhausted or finished with the quest, whichever came first.

And everything was compounding as his kills and xp racked up. On his next level up, he'd be stronger and his xp rate would rise.

He was getting closer and closer to the Anneal Blade at the same time. A weapon that would increase his DPS again which would, in turn, increase his xp rate even more.

It had also been confirmed that a player's Nepenthe kill count was proportional to the probability of a special Nepenthe spawning in. Both the dangerous ones with the fruit and the ones that dropped the ovule. That fact had been confirmed and taken advantage of back in the beta.

Players newly starting the quest would sometimes hire other players with high Nepenthe kill counts to just be in the area while they were fighting them to speed up the process of getting an ovule. The high killcount player would cause a special Nepenthe to appear much faster.

It was a shame that that wasn't an option for him at that moment. Hiring someone. But out of all players in the game, he probably had the highest killcount himself.

Every single moment counted. In the early game especially since so many other players were doing nothing.

He had to rush.

It was all about the next DPS upgrade. It was always about that.

It had to be.

* * *

He had been fighting for quite some time when the Nepenthes finally stopped spawning. It tended to happen when you stayed in a single area for too long. Eventually, the monsters would stop spawning for a bit to encourage you to find a new location or to take a break.

But this posed a bit of an unexpected problem for him. He knew that by the time he travelled to a different Nepenthe spawn point the ones in the area he was in right at that moment would have started spawning in again, so it wasn't efficient to do that.

So he just had to sit around waiting in an empty clearing with nothing to do for the minute or so that it took for them to start spawning again.

And that's when he started thinking about everything again.

He had mostly been able to stave off the majority of the events that had occurred earlier that day by keeping his mind consistently occupied with extreme, efficiency-oriented strategizing. But now that everything had been planned out, his mind finally decided to deal with the elephant in the room.

He had tried to ignore it all for as long as possible and push it all to the back of his mind but he couldn't any longer.

He collapsed against a tree and his thoughts spiralled downwards.

He surprised even himself when he noticed that there were tears in his eyes.

' _Am I… crying?'_

It had been a long time since he had done that.

But once it started, he couldn't stop it. He let out a choked sob as the full weight of what he had done crashed down on him.

He had killed someone. It had been pointless, too. For stealing his kill, he had ended that player's life. How messed up was that?

He still remembered how happy he had felt about it at the time.

It was always about efficiency for him. The crasher had delayed him, so the optimal move at the time had been to remove him from the situation using extreme force. So that's what Kirito had done.

All over a Dire Wolf.

He tried to justify it in his head. If he had known about what the consequences would be he never would have gone through with it. He knew that. It had been a mistake. An accident. And he hadn't meant to do it.

But none of these excuses helped him even a little bit.

It didn't change the fact that somebody was dead. It probably hadn't been quick or painless either. Death by getting your brain fried didn't sound like a good way to go. But that's what Kirito had subjected him to. Nothing would ever change that fact either. He was responsible. So he was just going to have to sit with that now and for the rest of his life. The guilt.

He deserved it.

There was nothing he would ever be able to do to change or make up for what he had done. Never. He was marked for life. He would never be able to look anyone in his family in the eye ever again.

' _They must be so... disappointed.'_

No.

Disappointed wasn't nearly strong enough. Hatred. That was the word. Suguha, and his parents… they were going to hate him when he got out. If he got out.

' _I don't even deserve to be alive at all.'_

Kirito looked down at the sword in his hand and allowed his thoughts to wander in a far darker direction than he typically allowed them to.

' _If I were to end it… how would I do it?'_

Players could damage themselves with their own weapons. So he could go that route. Stab himself and just lay down on the ground while his HP slowly went down to zero.

Or he could travel to the edge of the map and jump off the side. That'd take a bit longer and would require some travel time.

Or he could let the Nepenthes do it.

It didn't really matter.

The point was, he wouldn't be able to continue to live with the guilt of what he had done, so he shouldn't. He deserved to suffer through the same fate that he had put that crasher through. That was what was right. That was what was fair.

There was some family out there now, in the real world, that had been crushed by his actions. He had taken away a son from someone. A brother. Some family was now irreparably destroyed because he had been inconvenienced.

Did that player have a sister like him? Someone like Sugu?

Kirito would never be able to face someone like that.

He couldn't even remember the player's name. That player hadn't even mattered enough to find out at the time. Just some nameless inconvenience that deserved to die according to him.

' _Yeah,'_ he thought after a time. He was pretty sure that he hated himself.

* * *

A few minutes later, the Nepenthes started spawning in the area once more. When they did, it took an enormous amount of willpower to even stand up again.

He had debated whether or not it was worth it. If he should have just sat there and died, instead. But he did end up continuing, and he started fighting again, if for no other reason than to just finish the damn quest and cure that NPC's daughter.

He had a passing curiosity as to what, if anything, would come after that. The quest NPC hated him for being a criminal. So what would happen at the end of the quest? The dialogue was different.

Would he even get the Anneal Blade as a reward? Technically speaking, he could not claim to know this for certain since the quest had proven to be different for orange players in at least one respect. The reward could be different too. If there even was one at all.

What was left of the gamer inside him kind of wanted to know these answers. So he had decided to push his current dilemma back until then.

That was when he'd do it.

* * *

The first special Nepenthe to spawn in the area was of the wrong type. It was the dangerous kind with the exploding fruit. It had spawned into the game and, like all the other Nepenthes in the area, since Kirito was so low-levelled, he had aggroed it. This meant that he was stuck now, kiting it around in circles to ensure it didn't get too close while killing the others in the area.

He had been kiting it like this for almost half an hour now. Just circling and circling around the area. Over and over again. Endlessly.

He no longer had any idea about how long he had been there grinding. He hadn't paid any attention to his clock when he had started, so he didn't know for sure. And he didn't feel like putting in the mental effort required to give a reasonable estimate.

But, he had levelled up to 3 during that time and was well on his way to level 4. And by now, he had to have killed well over 100 Nepenthes. In terms of unique Nepenthes he had seen, combined with the ones he had found in that opening strategy of his, he was probably sitting at close to 200.

He either had much worse than average luck, or the spawning rates had changed. He really should have been done with the quest long ago.

The time seemed to be flying by for the most part though. Mostly because he didn't really care anymore if he survived. The danger he normally felt in situations like this was no longer present. And he had started recklessly fighting multiple opponents at once without a care.

It was negligent and rash, but he was way past caring. Because his kill speeds had radically improved.

He just wanted the quest to be over. There was no purpose or feeling in his attacks anymore. Just a cold ruthless efficiency and a desire to maximize kills per hour.

His swords, however, were not meant to be used that way. They were starting swords, meant to fight against level 1 Boars and Dire Wolves. Not these level 3 Nepenthes, and especially not for long periods.

His current sword's durability was at 50%, now, and he had already broken two others. Players were supposed to use their starting weapons on weak monsters only to get enough cor and materials to either upgrade them at a blacksmith or to buy better ones before fighting monsters like these. There was a real chance of running out of weapons before ever finishing the quest.

Kirito glanced behind him.

Every now and then, whenever he had cleared out the newest wave of Nepenthes, he'd find himself looking back at the one that was still following him around in circles.

If it got too close to him, the fruit would explode and dozens of Nepenthes would spawn in the area in an instant. He might be able to kill that fruited Nepenthe before its fruit exploded, but it was risky, to say the least. He had never tried doing something like that before.

He'd almost certainly die if that thing went off. But, despite that, he found himself wondering if it would make the Nepenthe he was looking for finally show up.

He was beginning to lose his patience.

Since he felt empty inside, he was finding it hard to find any downside to this idea. It was a remarkably liberating feeling. Walking around with certain knowledge that he was going to die and not caring at all. It was as if the world had ended and nothing else mattered. What did he care if a swarm of plants killed him?

With no purpose left, every minute that passed tempted him just a little bit more.

If he did die, he wouldn't see the end of the quest, but he was starting to care less and less about that. The quest was repeatable by others, so it's not like that NPC's daughter was really going to die. Other players would eventually complete the quest, too.

So it didn't objectively matter in the end whether or not he succeeded.

But still, he refrained.

He'd give it another five minutes...

* * *

He glanced up when the next wave of Nepenthes spawned and felt a small pang of surprise jolt through him.

Because there it was in all its glory. Finally, the Nepenthe with the flower had spawned. Kirito just had to kill it, get the drop, and avoid the fruited Nepenthe that was still following behind him.

With two Horizontals and a Slant, it was dead and the ovule was in his inventory.

It was over.

In the next instant, however, everything changed.

Something stabbed him in the back at high-speed and impaled him in an instant.

He never saw it coming.

Kirito felt the object bury into his back so deep that it came out the other end and it was only then that he found out what it was.

He watched as the blade of the sword pierced straight through his body and came out of his stomach.

He had been struck with so much force with the thing that his feet had left the ground, so he was unable to comprehend anything more than that before he felt his head slam into the tree in front of him as the sword buried hilt deep into his back and pinned him to it.

He was practically giving the tree trunk a big hug.

The player, after stabbing him, had rammed him into the thing. The player had had a lot of momentum behind him, and this confused Kirito a lot. He would have heard the player sprinting towards him from behind but he hadn't. Which meant that the player had to have leapt down from the treetops somehow.

He couldn't figure it out.

But either way, Kirito hadn't seen it coming. If he had chosen Searching as his second skill, he might have detected the ambush in advance. But with Hiding instead, his ability to detect other players was stuck at the default setting. But still, that normally should have been enough, and he couldn't figure out why it hadn't been. Had the other player used the Hiding skill on him somehow to sneak up on him?

He didn't know.

For a few seconds, Kirito didn't even react to the attack. Instead, he found himself in a daze of surprise and despondency.

When his mind finally caught up though, he quickly found out that he also... sort of didn't care about what had happened. He had been planning out his own death anyway so this potentially worked in his favour.

He didn't resist.

He actually found it kind of fitting. It was a truly meaningless death.

Kirito's eyes were dull and lifeless.

"Sorry," the player behind him apologized.

That came as a surprise.

' _Seriously?'_ Kirito thought in disbelief. ' _Sorry for killing you?'_

He didn't understand why anyone would even try something like that.

When Kirito craned his neck around to look at the other player, he was surprised at what he saw. He knew from the beta that attacking an orange player didn't change your cursor colour. So he had expected this player to ambush him and then begin an immediate all-out assault to kill him as fast as possible before he would be able to react because there would be no consequences in doing so.

It would have worked, too, if this player had done that. Kirito had offered up his life to this PKer for free and yet for some reason, it had not been taken.

He really shouldn't be alive at the moment. He wouldn't be if this had been a serious PKer.

Instead, the player had left him pinned to the tree with his sword, and then promptly struck the fruited Nepenthe with his buckler, causing the fruit to explode in a massive _Pop!_

Then the player disappeared again with the Hiding skill.

So many thoughts erupted in Kirito's mind at that moment. He didn't understand the purpose behind any of what had happened. It made no sense to him. Using the Nepenthes to kill him was completely unnecessary and so poorly thought out that it would, without a doubt, backfire on that player.

It would have been so much quicker and cleaner of a kill to just repeatedly stab him from behind.

The strangest part was that it was clear that the player had been a beta tester. Nobody else would have known how to get there so quickly otherwise. The path to this particular Nepenthe spawn point was complicated and tricky to navigate to if you didn't have prior knowledge of the area. That player should have known all of this.

How a beta tester could have possibly cobbled together a hare-brained scheme like this one was unimaginable.

The player was even trying to use Hide to escape from the Nepenthes which was especially idiotic.

Little Nepenthes did not have eyes. Hiding was not useful against them. At least, not without the more advanced Hiding abilities unlocked at the later levels. But nobody had access to those yet.

That player would find out very quickly that he had been caught in his own trap.

In his mind's eye, Kirito could pretty much visualize exactly what had happened. That player had used the same tactic that Kirito had discarded himself, earlier. He had tried to capitalize on Kirito's hard work and swoop in to steal the ovule straight out of his inventory.

But whether through sheer incompetence or succumbing to the pressures of personally murdering someone in the heat of the moment, the player had failed to follow through properly.

Or rather, he failed to do so in a way that would keep him from harm.

Kirito could see from the corner of his eye the countless red cursor's rapidly converging on him. When he had levelled up to 3 a while back, the previously purple cursors had changed colours indicating that they were now the same level. They would change to lighter shades as he levelled even higher.

Well, they would if he ever did level any higher. Because he was pretty much screwed at the moment.

He had been in this position before. Destroying a Nepenthe fruit and being attacked from all sides. Only, back then, he had been in a party with other players, all of whom had worked together and were at full health, and they had still all been wiped out.

He was impaled by a sword, pinned to a tree, with less than half of his remaining health left―which was still going down―and any attempt to remove the sword might kill him if he wasn't careful about it.

His own sword was also getting low on durability.

' _I guess, this is how it ends…'_

As the red cursors drew closer, and with nothing left to do, his mind started replaying his life.

* * *

He was a failure. All of his life had been nothing but failures.

He had dropped out of kendo and forced his sister to step in and cover for him.

He had found out that Suguha wasn't his sister and yet, like the selfish asshole that he was, he had distanced himself from her. He had turned cold as if nothing they had done together as kids was of any value.

He had retreated into his room and turned to video games and MMOs and virtual reality to escape the real world and all of his problems.

He had turned his back on his family. And every day, he found, he noticed that that door in his room got just a little bit heavier. It got harder and harder to leave every single day. Until eventually, that was where he spent all of his free time.

When the beta had come out for SAO, he had spent upwards of eight hours a day inside the game. Only ever leaving to eat, shower, go to school and sleep. He saw his family less and less by the day.

He found himself without any connection to them at all. They felt like strangers to him. With his adoptive parents gone all the time due to work, and his total isolation in his room, they hardly ever spoke to each other beyond necessity. As far as he could tell, they just lived in the same house. It seemed that that was where their relationship ended now.

He had no real family and no real friends. He had nothing and no one.

It was hell.

Every single thing he had ever valued in his life had either been taken from him or he had destroyed himself. Games had been the only thing left. And now he was stuck inside one having murdered someone. And he was moments away from dying a pointless death.

He had failed at everything. He failed everyone he knew, he lost all of the things in his life that had any value to him, and the one thing left remaining that he considered to be important was the thing that would kill him.

He was worthless.

He could feel tears start to form in his eyes.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

He had just been in this rut that he didn't know how to get out of. He wanted someone to help him out of it, he was waiting for someone to, but there was no one there who would. No one understood him at all. He was alone. He was always alone and he hated it.

He rested his forehead against the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes.

' _Onii-chan…'_ a voice from his memories echoed in his mind.

Kirito's eyes widened.

No. He wasn't alone. She had always been there. Even after he had pushed her away...

' _Sugu…'_

And in a moment of realization, everything fell into place.

_That_ was where he needed to draw the line. He could accept failing at most of the things he had ever done in his life. He could accept being hated by everyone, or being an isolated shut-in, or even being a murderer.

But that… that was the one thing he needed to get right.

He had always loved her. She was his sister. And he had done nothing but distance himself and be an overall jerk towards her. Even if she would never be able to look at him again, if even she hated him when he got out of this game, it didn't matter. He needed to tell her everything. If he died now, she would never know how he felt. That he had always cared about her. That none of it had been her fault.

Nobody was ever going to solve his problems for him. At some point, he needed to just say enough, dig in his heels, and take a stand.

And that was where he drew the line. He needed to talk to Suguha again. Just one more time…

That was enough to convince himself that reaching the end of the game was worth it.

Slowly, he tried to reach behind him to see if he could grab the pommel of the sword in his back. But he couldn't quite reach it.

So instead, he leaned back as much as he could and managed to create an inch or two of space between himself and the tree in which he could grab the blade pinning him to it. He did so and tried pulling the sword out of the tree.

He was _really_ pinned to it, though, and it wouldn't come loose. He just couldn't get the right amount of leverage or a strong enough grip on it with the tiny amount of space he was trying to work with.

The blade wouldn't come out on its own. Not in the same direction it had gone in, anyway.

That left only one option.

Since pulling it straight out of him didn't work, he pulled sideways, and out, in a motion reminiscent of Harakiri, but if the sword was in backwards.

Thankfully, the pain emulators in the game had a cap to them and it was set relatively low. As a result, removing the sword like this didn't leave him in unfathomable pain. It just created an extremely uncomfortable phantom pain that echoed throughout his insides. When the sword was out, he could still think straight, and most importantly, he was still alive.

Barely.

He hadn't pulled the sword out so much as he had pulled himself off of it, sideways. And that did a ton of damage, as he had practically ripped his own avatar's body in half in the process.

He was in the critical red zone when he was free. And there was no time to take out a health potion. Upon glancing behind him, he found himself totally surrounded. The first group of Nepenthes were clustered together right there. Less than three meters away.

He had no space to move around, and three of them were performing their spitting attack animation. And just behind them, there was a sea of red cursors. With a tree on one side and a swarm on the other, there were almost no options on the table for escape routes.

There were more than forty Nepenthes within twenty meters of him, all converging rapidly. He had maybe two seconds to live if he didn't do something _right now._

But he had found a purpose again. His sister's face was now burned into the forefront of his mind. He needed to see her again. At any cost.

One more time…

And the only thing he had to do to see her again, was the only thing he had ever been any good at. He needed to just... get up and play the game.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, matze3, Eiri Fllyn**


	3. The Swarm

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito had 2 meters of space to work with. With it, he spun completely around and faced the swarm, placing his back against the tree he had been pinned to. Then, he jumped towards the closest Nepenthe and planted both of his feet on its torso in a makeshift double-kick that did nearly no damage at all.

But it didn't need to. What he needed was the knockback. The instant his feet connected he extended his legs, kicking the Nepenthe back a foot or two, but also, and most importantly, it reversed his momentum back towards the tree. He kicked off the Nepenthe like a spring which allowed him to execute a very strange maneuver. It was similar to a frontflip, only, he was moving backwards during it. He rotated forwards, head over heels, yet his momentum from the kick had reversed his overall direction of travel backwards.

He had had to get incredibly creative to escape the situation with such a small amount of space.

Just before landing the flip, he staggered his feet and straightened out his back, almost as if he were walking in mid-air. He made sure his left foot would hit the ground first and then he activated the sword skill Sonic Leap.

Normally, it would be useless as he had no target and his feet weren't even on the ground yet. But, as long as he targeted _something_ with it and was in a proper starting position to execute it before it finished charging up, then it would work. If he didn't do either of those things, the skill would fail to execute and he'd die immediately given his current situation.

The instant the skill started charging, he leaned to the left and threw his weight over that side performing an almost half-spin in the air.

His left foot hit the ground first. But due to the twist, he was facing towards the tree, landing in a one-legged squat position with his right leg outstretched behind him. The move was completed when he bent his right leg just before it would have otherwise hit the ground. Due to the bend, his right leg had gone over his left and never actually hit the ground at all. It kept rotating, and he allowed his sword to follow the path swept out by his leg.

He found himself facing up the side of the tree he had been previously impaled on with all the extra rotational momentum putting him in a position where he was kicking upwards towards the sky with his right leg. That was when Sonic Leap finally activated. With a battle cry, it launched him up the trunk of the tree. There was enough momentum in that skill-assisted jump to take a full five steps up the length of the tree before finally having to kick off of it.

He backflipped over the first group of Nepenthes just as their spitting attacks hit the place where he had just been, moments earlier.

The fact that _that_ move had been his first instinct upon seeing the Nepenthe swarm that close, surprised even him. That janky flip had allowed him to avoid the first set of attacks. Now, however, upon landing on the ground, he was surrounded again. He had bought himself a couple of seconds, but now he was stuck again, right on death's door.

His first impression of his surroundings was that he was in an utterly hopeless situation. He was in the middle of a swarm, and even if he managed to get out, there was another swarm coming out from the treeline on all sides.

There was no way to kill all the ones around him in time. He wouldn't even make a dent in them before the sheer number of enemies swallowed him up.

The swarm was arranged roughly as two concentric circles. One circle within the other. He had been on the inside of the inner ring when he had first started by the tree, but he had managed to flip over it and into the space between the two circles. Beyond the outer ring, there were large numbers of Nepenthes scattered around even further out, all converging on his position.

An instant later, he was moving. He did the only thing he could think of. He changed up his fighting style and went for a hit and run approach.

It was a strategy that didn't get him any kills at all. Not at first, anyway. But that wasn't the intent behind it. If he stopped moving, he would pretty much die instantly from all the acid attacks, so instead, he elected to strike each Nepenthe he passed once, and move on to the next without slowing down. While this would grant him no kills, it would allow him to start slowly building up damage.

The acid attacks were linear and would target the place he was currently at rather than where he was going, so he could get ahead of them if he just kept moving. Every time his feet left the ground, usually as many as three _splatting_ sounds would hit where his heels had just been. It felt like it was raining acid.

But he had a strategy now. He had quickly discovered an oddity in how these Nepenthes were moving. They did not have the intelligence required to cut him off as he ran in the space between the two rings. So with extremely careful footwork, Kirito could manipulate their positions, ensuring that he'd never run out of places to retreat to.

There was always a gap. As long as some Nepenthes were frozen using their acid attack, and he manipulated the others by carefully managing his speed, there had to always be one somewhere. He could create tiny pockets of space between the monsters big enough to weave through. He just had to keep finding them.

There were so many Nepenthes in the area that the characteristic _splat_ of acid hitting the ground sounded like a machine gun firing, continuously. Always landing exactly behind him. But there was a saving grace. Most of these Nepenthes were stuck behind others, so the number that could attack him at any given moment was limited.

The trickiest part to deal with was the vines. They were mostly unpredictable and he had to rely on split-second instincts to judge the next location to jump to. If he screwed up even one time he was dead.

He zigzagged between these rings hitting a random Nepenthe a single time almost every time he took another step.

His plan was counterintuitive and probably wouldn't work but it was all that he had. He could not kill the swarm fast enough to escape from it but he didn't need to. In theory, all he technically needed to do to get out was kill a lot of them in a single instant. If he killed them off slowly, the Nepenthes behind would just replace the ones that vanished. But if instead, Kirito killed an entire flank in only a few seconds, there would be an opening as the rest tried to scramble to close the gap. And this was what he was after. He was targeting a specific group of Nepenthes in particular in the hopes that he could eventually lower their HP enough to kill them all with a single attack and pierce through the outer ring to the outside where he would have more options.

It was a weird situation to be in. He was deliberately going out of his way to not kill his enemies so that he could manipulate the geometry of the swarm itself. He wanted all the weak Nepenthes grouped up in one specific location to prevent the stronger ones from being there when he made his breakout attempt at that localized spot.

He had never tried to do something like that before. Nobody had, he was pretty sure. No one had ever tried taking on such a huge number of enemies at one time as far as he knew. At least, nobody had developed a systematic procedure like this to do so.

Now all that remained was to see if it would work.

His surroundings were a blur as he weaved through the razor-thin openings in the swarm. It was the craziest thing he had ever done in his life. He experienced dozens of extremely close calls where he almost died, but he managed to squeeze through each one by the skin of his teeth.

Kirito lost all sense of time and ran entirely on his instincts.

Eventually, he noticed that he had successfully manipulated the swarm in the way he had intended and so he made his breakout attempt.

He lunged into the middle of the crowd with a savage determination to survive and ripped them all to pieces. He had so little space to work with and was so constricted that he had to deal with some with his literal, bare hands. It was an extremely reckless assault that had almost backfired on him when he nearly missed an oncoming vine. But the tactic succeeded, and he finally broke out after literally body-checking a final Nepenthe, picking it up over his shoulder and tossing it at the last one standing in his way, knocking it over.

Then he was outside the group. Somehow, still alive.

At that moment, it felt as if he had just swum to the surface of the ocean after escaping from a downed submarine laying on the ocean floor. He couldn't believe that it had worked and sheer luck had probably played the biggest part in his success.

What he had just done should have been impossible.

But he was by no means safe yet.

The leftover concentric rings he had escaped out of suddenly merged to form a circular cluster behind him. The next wave was coming in from all sides but he still had a handful of seconds before it arrived.

He took a quick glance at his HP bar and felt a pit form in his stomach.

He immediately pulled out a potion.

He hadn't even been able to see it. His bar was just empty. His HP had to be in the low single digits. But he did not have enough time to actually read the number.

Unfortunately, he noticed quite quickly that he did not have an opportunity to drink his potion. Before he could, he had to start dodging a bunch of acid attacks and vines.

He needed to make an opening.

He achieved this by immediately sprinting towards the oncoming swarm arriving from the outside. This gained him some distance from the group he had just escaped from, the one behind him, even if it closed the distance to the new one coming toward him.

Once he was at the midway point between these two groups, he found himself just far enough away from the closest monster to heal.

He wasted no time in doing so.

Then he spun back around, frantically trying to figure out what to do next.

Seeing his health rise out of the 'Holy Shit' zone, through the deep crimson, and into the red, putting him at around 20% of his full HP, was a huge relief. The potion cooldown then hit, and he knew immediately by judging the distance between himself and the two large groups of monsters he was contending with that he would not have enough time to wait for it to run out. He wouldn't be able to drink another potion and he needed to start making use of the space he had left to do as much damage as possible before he was tightly surrounded again.

He grit his teeth and immediately sprinted towards the new, outer swarm of Nepenthes once again.

He needed to break through it before he ended up surrounded again. There was still the leftover inner swarm to deal with so he would be attacked from two sides if he couldn't get out.

But the outer ring was several Nepenthes deep and he couldn't quite manage to get through it. He immediately found himself on the retreat, forced back towards the inner swarm behind him.

There were way too many and he couldn't just… sit still and deal with them. Every time he tried he'd have to avoid more acid attacks. He was spending the vast majority of his time dodging and blocking so he couldn't deal any significant damage himself.

He could only sneak in single attacks here and there before needing to fall back.

But there was no other option that he could see. So he had to try.

It was a race. Could they close in around him before he had the chance to break through the line?

For another few seconds or so, it looked as if he might have a shot of winning.

...But there were just too many to get through.

At one crucial moment, it became immediately clear that the plan wouldn't work. He just didn't have enough space so he abandoned it. The inner swarm had reached him again so he needed to run.

He turned and started mindlessly zig-zagging, desperately looking for another way out.

Every step, however, looked more and more hopeless.

But then he saw the tree again. The one he had been pinned to.

When he had attacked the new, outer group of monsters, the inner swarm had been lured away from the tree slightly. And this gave him a new idea. Just like his last one, it was counterintuitive. He would once again deliberately avoid killing his enemies and instead carefully kite the inner swarm in the remaining space he had left. He'd lure the inner group in one direction, then with careful timing, he'd quickly sprint around it back towards that tree in an attempt to get there right as the new swarm erased the last of his empty space. He'd then backflip off the tree once again, just like he had done earlier, and make it outside the front line of the fast-approaching, outer swarm.

Kirito had gotten lucky with the way the nepenthes were laid out. The original swarm that had spawned in from the popping fruit had split off into two main groups. So Kirito had only gotten around half of them at first. The other half had been dealing with that other player all this time and was only now reaching him―after presumably killing said player.

If they had all come at once, the front line would have been too thick for his limited AGI stat to be able to jump over in this manner and he never would have made it.

He initiated his plan immediately.

Slowly, he kited the inner group away from the tree while keeping an eye on the main force that was closing in from behind him.

He only had a handful of seconds to pull everything off. He needed to get to the tree at the exact instant that the ring of Nepenthes was close enough to be jumped over. Being too early was just as bad as being too late.

When his moment arrived, he lightly jogged towards the tree, carefully controlling his speed, and only broke into a sprint when he deemed the outer ring close enough.

Then he ran as fast as his AGI stat allowed him to.

He made it to the tree and then skill jumped up it in the same fashion as he had before.

...Minus the janky flip at the beginning, anyway.

Sonic Leap led him into a five-step vertical wall-run up the trunk. On the last step, he backflipped, but he made sure to send himself sideways during it. If he just went straight backwards as he had earlier, he'd land squarely in the middle of the group he was trying to get away from and wouldn't get anywhere except six feet in the ground. Sideways and to the right was his only way out so that was the direction he chose.

Like this, he backflipped over and out of the densest part of the swarm.

When he landed, he was outside.

Without hesitation, he immediately turned and bolted into the surrounding forest.

* * *

Running as fast as he could through the trees, dodging the occasional stray Nepenthe, he almost immediately realized that he might have just made a huge mistake.

Because he was completely lost.

Upon realizing this, he immediately drank another health potion, putting his HP at about 40%, and with a grimace, he halted in his tracks and turned back around.

There was no time to get off another heal due to the cooldown timer. He couldn't properly open up his map to plan out a proper escape route, either.

While the majority of the Nepenthes were in that gigantic, massive swarm that he had escaped from, the whole area was still teeming with them. Only about two-thirds of them had been back there. The final third that he was only starting to see now were the ones that had taken too long to get over there before Kirito had gotten away.

They were loosely scattered throughout the surrounding forest. There were mini-groups of 5 or 6 in all directions, and stray ones as well. It was nowhere near as dense as it had been back near that tree he had previously been pinned to, but it posed another problem for him of a different sort.

He was in an unfamiliar environment. The forest looked practically the same in every direction. So he had no idea where the path was, and to find out, he'd have to open up his menu, navigate through a bunch of pages to open up his map, then mess around with the zoom settings, find out what cardinal direction he was currently facing, and plot out a route from there.

Even if he rushed, this would take him at least a minute to pull off.

This was not an option in the middle of combat. Especially when those opponents had long-ranged attacks and when he was in the middle of a forest during the dead of night.

Now that he was in a position to notice, there was a pretty horrifying lack of long-range visibility in his current environment.

Because of the way the game worked, monster hunting grounds had a slight boost to their background luminosity to make it easier for players to see what they killed. Kirito had just spent several hours on top of a spawn point, so he hadn't been faced with the reality of his situation until after leaving.

It was dark. Really, really dark. There was a canopy full of leaves above him totally blocking out the sky. Trees were everywhere. The sun had set hours ago. There was no natural moonlight because there were 99 floors above him blocking it out.

Then there was the matter of his now-noticeable lack of a Searching skill.

Back during the beta, Kirito had chosen that as his second skill. So he had always had access to it. There had never been a moment in which he did not have it on him.

Until now.

All throughout the beta, he had learned how to fight and he had built up all of his habits while taking for granted the passive boosts that that skill applied to his field of view. In particular, the boost to the surrounding brightness level.

He did not know, until that moment, exactly how dark the game could get.

He could barely see anything, and in some spots, it was so dark that it looked like he was staring into the event horizon of a black hole.

He almost wanted to laugh at himself now. He had always wondered, back then, why so many players took torches and other light sources with them whenever they went on late night hunting trips. There had always been enough light to manage for him so he had always thought that they were just noobs that were being overly cautious.

But now it was clear. He had actually been the strange one. His Searching had been so over levelled that he hadn't even noticed the massive advantage that he had had at the time.

Torches and other portable light sources existed in the game. Obviously, they served a purpose.

Obvious in hindsight.

There were exactly two sources of light that he could see now.

Because of the fact that he had stopped running away from the swarm relatively soon after noticing all of these new problems, he wasn't all that far away from the hunting ground he had just left. It had been a pretty open area as well, with only a couple of trees here and there in the small clearing.

This meant that on top of the hunting ground boost to the luminosity, the lack of a thick canopy above had boosted it a little bit as well. Just enough for Kirito to not notice any of these problems until now. But it also meant that some of that luminosity propagated all the way over to where he currently found himself―sort of halfway in between the darkened forest and the hunting ground itself. He could still easily follow the light to get back to where he had been and could even see the swarm frantically making its way over to him. He could even make out the shape of the tree he had backflipped off of in the distance, but only barely.

But then there was the second source of light and it created one of the most terrifying visual effects in the game that he had ever seen.

The red cursors.

Kirito could still see the sheer number of them in the distance, but the truly scary thing about them was that they were rapidly vanishing as the swarm approached.

Whether a player could see a monster's cursor or not depended on a bunch of things. Does the monster have an effect or a boost that allows them to be tricky to spot? Does the player have the Searching skill? Does the player have a weird item on them that lets them see in the dark? Do they have an active light source? How dark is the surrounding environment?

Many other things as well.

It was a complicated calculation, but it worked intuitively. If you thought that something should help you see monsters better, it probably would.

But in any case, this calculation did not swing in Kirito's favour in this instance.

So as the Nepenthes left the slightly brightened area of the hunting ground to come after him, they entered the darkened areas of the surrounding forest and so the game vanished their cursors.

But Kirito could still see them. The Nepenthes. At least, he could see the faintest outlines of their silhouettes. But they all blended together. So it wasn't so much a bunch of walking plants heading towards him that he was seeing, but a black whirling mass coming at him like a tidal wave.

The forest was _moving_ with them.

And then there was the sound. The constant background and movement noises of the Nepenthes themselves were coming from all directions producing a hiss that never ceased.

If he had to compare it to anything, he'd probably say that it sounded like what you'd imagine walking into a closed-off cave filled with a million snakes inside would sound like.

It was coming from everywhere, all at once. Including behind him.

Now, one route that he could take in a situation like that is to open up his inventory and pull out a torch and light it up. He did have one on him that he hadn't used yet because he hadn't needed it. It came with a bundle of items he had purchased at a store earlier.

If he pulled it out then he might be able to use it to guide himself away from the swarm. He could just... always travel in the direction where there were no cursors and no sounds. He might be able to get away if he did that. But it came with its own set of risks that he wasn't sure he could justify taking.

The first was getting the thing out and turning it on. That would require digging through his inventory and looking away from his surroundings for a decent length of time. Which would be difficult, though probably not impossible if he set his mind to it.

But then it would practically turn into one of those cliche horror movie scenes, where he'd be running away in the dead of night, in a scary forest with nothing but a torch, trying to get away from a group of monsters approaching from all directions.

He hated those movies.

His ability to fight would also be limited in that situation because of the fact that one of his hands would be occupied with the torch. It would be easy for him to get blindsided as well. And losing track of the swarm of Nepenthes could be dangerous in its own right because he'd have no idea which directions were safe to travel in if he couldn't see them.

They also didn't last long, either. Those torches. If it went out while he was nowhere near a hunting ground with some background lighting, he could end up in a really bad spot.

But if he could get far enough away and if he could buy enough time with that torch to take a good look at his map, he could probably escape this way.

If this were the only problem he was facing, this is the direction he probably would have gone in because it seemed to be the easiest and he was desperate.

But it wasn't the only problem. It wasn't even the biggest one, either.

He wasn't alone in the forest.

He had already met one player that had tried to kill him. They were probably dead by now, but Kirito couldn't be sure. But what if they hadn't been alone? What if that player had been part of a party of PKers that were targeting everyone in the forest?

Lighting up a torch and running through the woods would just tell them exactly where he was.

But again... Kirito probably would have chanced this too if there wasn't the final thing stopping him.

The Nepenthes wouldn't despawn. And that was the crux of the matter.

What if during the time Kirito ran away, dragging this giant swarm of Nepenthes after him, he stumbled into someone? A totally innocent player?

One of two things would happen then. Either they would get swarmed and killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Kirito would have to try and save them.

But if he did that, then they would inevitably find out about his cursor.

And even if this didn't happen, even if he didn't run into anyone and successfully made it out of the forest without incident, the swarm of Nepenthes would just… hang around wherever they ended up. The system would not get rid of them, so there would just be a big mass of them hanging around in the forest waiting for the first unlucky player to stumble across them.

That was unbelievably dangerous for a ton of different reasons and could get someone killed.

The other players were valuable to him. Even if they all banded together and tried to kill him eventually, Kirito still needed as many of them alive as possible. Because he expected that they would be doing most of the legwork in clearing the game.

Since there was no player replacement, and the in-game population would only ever decrease, saving the life of one player in the early game could have an enormous effect on the long term history of the game itself.

Because maybe they'd one day turn into a raid leader. Or start a guild. Or do something amazing that benefited everyone.

Maybe they would do something that would allow Kirito to see his sister again.

To be fair, maybe not, too, but he couldn't take that chance.

So he needed to deal with that swarm.

To do that he needed some open space and some light, and the closest place with both of those things was the clearing he had just left.

So, with his decision made, he clenched his teeth and made his way back. He circled around the swarm that was approaching him, bypassing it, and kited them all right back to the very same hunting ground where they had all started.

All of their cursors returned when they exited the trees into the moonlight.

* * *

Since he wasn't surrounded this time, Kirito simply had to deal with a swarm that was coming from one direction. This made it possible to win.

He focused completely on healing up first. He stayed a good distance away from the group as he started travelling in large circles around the circumference of the hunting ground while waiting for his potion timer to reset. When it did, he took out another potion and drank it too.

He was walking backwards, keeping the swarm in his sights.

New Nepenthes were still trickling in from the surrounding forest and occasionally, Kirito would have to alter his path to avoid them.

The Nepenthes were pooling together into a large mass in front of him as he continued to walk. He was carefully controlling his speed to make sure that he was moving at the exact same rate that they were. This was to make sure that they were always in the exact same position relative to him.

The front of the group was always a little over 10 meters in front of him. Just a tiny bit outside the range of the spitting attack.

He had actually managed to find the exact point at which the front line would not fire those off. If he faltered a tiny bit on a single step, he'd suddenly be in the range of the attack and as many as 15 or 20 Nepenthes would suddenly begin the attack animation. So he'd have to immediately turn and run out of range when that happened.

But otherwise, he found a surprisingly stable position to be in that he had not ever expected to find.

He was close enough to be in visual range of every Nepenthe in the group, so they were all trying to approach him. But he was far enough away that they couldn't reach him. And he was moving fast enough to prevent them from cutting him off or surrounding him.

There were probably 60 or 70 Nepenthes in front of him by his estimate, and more were still trickling in, but only a few at a time.

But he seemed to be perfectly safe as long as he just… kept casually walking backwards in a big loop.

For the next several minutes, he just walked them all around in a big circle in increasing disbelief.

He tried putting his finger on the precise reason why these monsters were so dangerous in the first place. Because nobody would think so just by watching him lead them along like this.

It came as an absolute shock to him how effective a brain-dead strategy as simple-minded as: ' _just like… walk in front of 'em, man,'_ actually was and now he was trying to figure out why it was working at all.

Having a huge group of them after you wasn't what was so dangerous about having a fruit burst, he eventually realized. It was when they weren't collected together in a big pile like this. When they surrounded you from all sides and there was no opportunity to escape, only then were they deadly.

That was why he had died to these things that one time back in the beta, and why he had almost died again only a few minutes ago. When the fruit had burst, Nepenthes had been everywhere in all directions and they all closed in together. This had the side-effect of slowly removing any open space that he could freely travel through, making it impossible to loop indefinitely.

There was no way to pool them up like this when you were in the center of a ring that was closing together around you. Not without a tree to backflip off of, anyway.

But when you had them all on one side of you, and you had some open space, there existed a stable position where you could remain indefinitely without being in any danger.

As long as you manage your speed properly.

Nepenthes didn't have eyes, and they tracked you down by your scent. However, the further away you travelled from them, the less precise this sense of theirs was.

When they had an exact read on your position, they always tended to take the shortest possible path to get to you. Their pathfinding was incredibly predictable in those situations and this was why Kirito could manipulate the way they moved so easily. He could do it with something as simple as changing up his footwork a little.

But this only worked for Nepenthes that were closeby. The further away they were, the less precise their read on you would be. So they would only be able to get a general idea of where you were, and their pathfinding would suddenly become much more erratic and unpredictable.

So if he went too fast while leading the Nepenthes on in this way, the ones at the back of the swarm would lose their ability to 'see' him properly and this would cause the swarm to slowly split apart as their pathfinding algorithms changed to reflect this uncertainty.

This meant that the diameter of the swarm mattered. So did the range in which the Nepenthes could 'see' him. And how many there were in the group.

This meant that, strangely, if a burst fruit had caused too many more Nepenthes than this to spawn in at a single time, this looping strategy wouldn't work. The diameter would be too big.

The diameter of the swarm plus the distance between Kirito himself and the outer edge of the swarm, that quantity, had to be less than the visual range of the Nepenthe that was furthest in the back. Otherwise, the swarm would break apart.

And if Kirito had needed to move any closer to get it to work than where he currently stood, then he'd be bombarded by acid attacks.

So this strategy depended entirely on the parameters that had been determined by the developers for these Nepenthes. If they had been changed around a bit from what they were, it wouldn't have worked.

But now came the tricky part.

How was he going to actually start killing them off?

' _I guess I'll have to do it one hit at a time.'_

Just like earlier. His hit and run tactic.

The hardest problem to have to deal with involving these Nepenthes was the fact that the attack range for their acid attack was different than the actual distance the acid could fire.

Kirito had seen the attack launch so many times already that he had already completely understood it in its entirety.

A Nepenthe would only decide to shoot it off when a player stepped within a specific range. When that happened, the Nepenthe would begin the attack animation. And it would continue the animation, even if the player left that range immediately afterwards.

...Because they had a secondary, larger attack range in which a Nepenthe could modify the trajectory of an already triggered acid attack if it found a player within this bigger range.

Then for the next second or so, the Nepenthe would tilt, and rotate itself appropriately to follow along with the player's movements in their secondary attack range to ensure they remained in sight until the attack was fully charged.

Finally, the Nepenthe would decide on the exact target to shoot at and would fire the attack in that direction a moment later.

This was why Kirito could dodge the attacks. Once a Nepenthe committed to a target, they would not change the trajectory again even if the player moved, yet it would still take them almost another full second to actually shoot the acid.

But the discrepancy between the primary and secondary attack ranges was the problem he was up against now.

Kirito was right on the outer edge of the primary attack range. If he slowed down even a tiny bit, acid attacks would trigger. But he could not simply take a single step backwards to avoid them afterwards. Because while this would take him out of the first range to trigger the attack, it would not take him out of the secondary range in which the Nepenthes could aim their attacks.

He had to wait until the Nepenthes committed to their targets, and then move out of the way in the following second.

This was achieved in one of two ways. The obvious way when you were fighting only one or two Nepenthes at a time involved watching the animation carefully and waiting for the precise animation cue that told you that the Nepenthe had committed to a target and would not alter the trajectory again, and then move out of the way.

But this was impractical when fighting massive numbers of them at a time. Kirito could not keep track of 50 or 60 attack animations simultaneously, so the only way to be perfectly safe was to always be moving. He had to assume that there was always an acid attack a single second away from hitting him, which, given the numbers he was dealing with, wasn't too far from the truth.

So he had to always move out of the way of whatever attack was aimed at him at that moment in time. And the only way to do this was to hit and run.

Jump into range, hit a single monster, and move onto the next, never stopping at any time for anything. And then he'd have to repeat the process over and over again. For as long as it took.

That was the plan.

He needed to do it systematically and in a carefully controlled way.

Once he was up to full health, he took a deep breath and began.

* * *

The vines were a non-issue for the most part. Kirito could get in and out of their attack range faster than the Nepenthes could retaliate with them as long as he stuck with only a single hit at a time. So it was really just the acid that posed some problems.

He eventually settled on a strategy. Circle the group just like he had done before.

Jumping in close and then turning and jumping away in back and forth straight lines was massively inefficient and took so much more time than continuously circling did. So this was the strategy that seemed the most natural.

Acid was constantly being sprayed into the air, landing right behind him.

It was a terrifying sight to see at first. But once he got used to it, it just became normal.

Instant death in the form of an acid wave was always no more than a foot or two behind him. But he realized quite quickly that the wave was never going to catch up to him so it didn't matter. He didn't even have to look back at it. The process was controlled and he was the one controlling it.

So all he had to do to win was grind. Do the exact same thing over and over again until there were none left.

As long as he didn't screw something up, it was just a matter of time.

* * *

He had learned something interesting when he finally finished.

That strategy would not have been possible if there had been any other players nearby. If he had been part of a party, they would have been wiped. And the reason for that was because he was the only one that the Nepenthes were going after. All of their pathfinding was directed at him alone. If there had been someone else nearby, the group would have split up and become much more dangerous.

If anything had prevented him from looping or had forced him to stop or try and reverse directions, everything would have destabilized. It was so… finicky. If he had tried to kill those things in any other way other than the way he had, it wouldn't have worked and he might have died.

It was just a mind-bending concept to him. The safest way to fight those things was to do it alone. Ironically, a party would have been worse off.

With that realization, he sheathed his sword and walked out of the empty hunting ground and into the forest.

* * *

He had to resort to using his map data to find his way back to a path that he recognized. He had his torch out and it was lit, and he had his other hand resting on the handle of his sword, waiting to draw it at any moment.

He was also, periodically, testing out his Hide ability whenever he happened to pass through an area that had enough light to justify extinguishing his torch.

It was incredibly weak at the moment. It could completely conceal him, but it was extremely fragile due to his low level in the skill. It was almost impractical. Even in the dead of night, it routinely failed on him due to him making too much noise or not having any sort of proper cover. It would not be of any use in combat, especially. And Kirito was essentially forced to decide between either carrying his torch so that he could see, or hide from his surroundings. He couldn't do both at once as the flame would destroy his own camouflage.

Carefully, he made his way back down the path towards Horunka Village.

Kirito continued down the path in the forest until he came across a pile of items on the ground, one of which he actually recognized.

It was that buckler. The one that _that_ player had been holding. The one that had tried to kill him. It was the item that that player had destroyed the Nepenthe fruit with.

Kirito assumed that the sword on the ground just next to it was the one that had been used to impale him on that tree, as well. That player must have summoned it back to his hands at some point.

Players could summon weapons and items that belonged to them back into their hands, which effectively teleported them from wherever they were in the environment.

For instance, you could drop a sword, teleport to a different floor, leaving it behind on the ground, and still summon it back to your hand, instantly. It'd simply require opening up your menu and clicking a few buttons. That feature was in place to prevent the possibility of getting your weapon permanently stolen by someone else.

But you could also consciously choose to not summon it back, as that player had done. He had left his sword impaled through Kirito for a while, pinning him to that tree, and then he must have summoned it back while Kirito had been fighting his own swarm, upon realizing that it was not possible to use Hide to avoid the Nepenthe's sense of smell. Then the player must have died and dropped everything he had on the ground. That had caused the Nepenthe swarm following him to suddenly turn back and go after Kirito, the only remaining player in the area.

At least, this was what Kirito's best guess was. He couldn't exactly ask the player to find out if this theory was right. He could only try and figure everything out based on the clues he found.

But he supposed that it didn't really matter, either. Whatever had happened, Kirito had come out on top.

The items on the ground in front of him would eventually degrade into nothing if no one picked them up, so Kirito made sure to. It was unlikely that he'd ever be able to resupply himself from a store of any kind, so he had to make the most out of opportunities like this one.

Kirito sighed as he scavenged all of the dead player's items.

The player had tried to kill him. But to be honest, a part of him was also a bit thankful for it. If Kirito hadn't been attacked like that, he might not have ever found another purpose to live for. He had just… given up on everything. At _that_ moment, he had completely surrendered himself and accepted his death. And it was only luck and either that player's incompetence or conscience that had ended up sparing him in the end.

He couldn't do that again. Kirito needed to make it out alive.

He was going to beat the game. He'd do it on his own if he had to. But he would win, so he could see his family again.

_Suguha._

He needed to talk to her again.

' _Just one more time…'_

* * *

When he finally made it back to Horunka Village, he could see a lot of players walking around. Kirito expected that every single one of them was a beta tester. Nobody else would have had the skills to navigate there so soon, otherwise.

The path between Horunka Village and the Town of Beginnings was tricky for a brand new player to handle. It wove right through the middle of a huge hunting ground filled with dire wolves and boars. You had to be extremely careful or otherwise travel in a large group to make it all the way there safely.

And the time of day mattered, too. It had been well past 5:00 p.m when Kayaba had made his announcement. By then, monster spawning had already increased from the baseline because of that evening boost to it. And it had only increased further as time went on and it got later and later. When the sun was down completely, it got extremely dangerous to be outside of a city when you were too low levelled and didn't know what you were doing.

Kirito himself had come across multiple roving bands of monsters on his way over, but they hadn't posed him any trouble because of his vast combat experience. He had already killed hundreds of them over his gaming career and knew all about their weak points.

All of these other players wandering around the village had to have that same experience as well. Otherwise, they wouldn't have made it. New players probably wouldn't be showing up until tomorrow at the absolute earliest. And only the really dedicated ones would make it that far that quickly. Realistically, he didn't expect any new players to show up in significant numbers until around the second week of the game.

There was just too much for them to learn before they could survive a trip like that.

They had to learn the basics of combat, how the monster spawns worked, how the time of day affected that, then they had to form a party of players that they could rely on. They needed decent equipment, which required a decent sum of cash, but it would be a struggle to get that because of how overcrowded that whole region was going to be due to the near 10,000 players currently using that city as their home base. All of those hunting grounds would be saturated for weeks, slowing down everybody's progress.

Then, perhaps most importantly, they needed to find a reason to leave the safety of that city in the first place. Why would any new player decide to leave now that death was real? It had everything. Inn rooms, stores, restaurants, there were hundreds of different quests―many of which Kirito himself had never even completed and some of which, he was sure, he didn't even know about. There hadn't been enough time to go through it all back in the beta. A player could spend months there before running out of things to do. So why would anyone leave? Why give up the safety of that place for the unknown? Especially when that unknown was surrounded by dangerous things?

For former beta testers and people like Kirito, the answer was obvious. It was the only way to progress. If you didn't leave that city, you were stuck underneath a ceiling and would never be able to get out from under it. And the longer you spent underneath it, the greater the opportunity cost you would be paying.

But this was not an obvious realization. Kirito himself had needed this concept explained to him several years ago when he first got into serious gaming. And he had carried it with him ever since. But many of these new players were not like him. They were casuals who had only picked up SAO to check out what all the hype was about. He could only imagine how difficult it would be for these sorts of players to have to come to terms with all of this now. Yet the longer they took to do so, the worse off they would be.

They didn't have access to the SAO wiki anymore. They didn't have access to any of the YouTube tutorials and guides. They couldn't watch any popular streamers. They couldn't look up easy money making methods, or training methods, or which skills to pick up early, and which were best avoided until later. They wouldn't know about the common pitfalls that new players fell into all the time like swapping out and resetting their skills too many times.

No one was there to guide them and, as a result, every single one of them would be paying a massive opportunity cost that would follow them around forever.

It would take quite some time for the players who decided to stay in that city to understand all of this. Only the proportion of players who were serious about progressing and completing the game would be leaving any time soon.

But this idea had a strange consequence to it. Pretty much every single serious beta tester knew about all of this already. They knew about all the pitfalls, and how spending even one day back in that city could permanently destroy their chances of reaching their full potential.

If you stayed back there for even one day, like everyone else, you would find out that tomorrow, due to how crowded the city was and how hard it was to make money, that you would make the decision to stay there for a second day, too. Then a third. Then the next thing you knew, you would be spending the week there.

Only the ones that knew to avoid this in advance―the really ambitious and serious gamers―had decided that they had to get out while they could. And there was only one way to go. Horunka Village.

This meant that for the first, and probably the last time in the game's history, the players were segregated into groups based on their experience. All of the serious beta testers were either at Horunka Village already, or were making their way over that night. And this migration was happening while the new players were sleeping soundly in their inn rooms in the Town of Beginnings.

This was the first and most important step in the process that would end up causing the massive power and wealth inequality in the coming months and years, and most players weren't even realizing it was happening.

Kirito could see the looks in their eyes. He was using Hide so nobody could see his cursor, and was sticking to the shadows as he slowly made his way over to the quest NPC's house, but he could tell what the collective mindset was.

Nobody was talking to each other, but everyone knew. They shared knowing glances. Everyone there knew that they had all had the foresight to escape the trap at the starting city.

Years from now, the vast majority of the important guild leaders, decision-makers, and the strongest players would all have one thing in common and they all knew it. They had gone out of their way to spend the night of November 6, 2022, in the piss-poor conditions of Horunka Village instead of the much more luxurious and comfortable inn rooms in the Town of Beginnings.

This village was only designed to accommodate a few dozen players comfortably. Even that stretched the limits. It was not designed to be a home base. Its primary function was to serve as the mid-way point between the starting city, and the next city over. However, the second leg of the journey going from Horunka to the next city could not be realistically completed that day.

This was due to the huge hordes of monsters blocking the way. As you progressed through a floor, you couldn't just run to the floor dungeon in one day and start clearing it out immediately. It took time and quite a bit of effort to clear a path to even get there at all. All of the roads were blocked at first. Sometimes by a huge horde of monsters, sometimes by a miniboss, and other times by a quest that could only be completed once, but that usually tended to be extremely difficult.

This was why there existed anything at all called ' _the front line'_. It represented the furthest that a player could travel consistently, and safely, without running into the thousands of monsters at the front.

All of the hunting grounds that the main roads travelled through had huge garrisons of monsters pre-spawned into them that did not respawn once they were eliminated. Once these huge groups were wiped out, only then would the roads become safe enough to travel down.

Ordinarily, this should have stopped anyone from making it to Horunka Village at all that day because that road too had been blocked like this initially. And it still was blocked, technically speaking. But the players had been chipping away at it for hours before Kayaba had even made his announcement. Many returning players had been overly-eager to progress and had started clearing out those monsters only minutes after logging in. And that had been going on all the way until Kayaba's announcement. Kirito had even helped out in that effort in his own small way, having chosen to whittle away at a dire wolf hunting ground in a corner that nobody else had locked down yet since it was out of the way and everyone else wanted to clear the path to Horunka. His strategy had been to travel in the opposite direction of the main road having predicted that the road to Horunka would be loaded with parties of players.

Those players had put in a ton of work during that time, and Kirito had been able to capitalize on it. By the time that Kirito had left, the road had been cleared more than enough to squeeze through if you knew what you were doing.

There were still large swaths of monsters back there, but the players had effectively punched a sizable hole through them along the length of the paved road to the village, allowing anyone to get through for a brief period. Throughout the night, however, as that large group of remaining monsters continued to randomly move around and spread out, the road would close down again and would have to be cleared once again in the morning.

This meant that consistent travel between Horunka and the Starting City was not yet possible. There was only this brief moment in time in which it was due to the players' efforts. Once these players went to sleep and the monsters spread out and plugged up the gap again, Horunka Village would basically end up cut off from the rest of the players again. It'd basically be encircled until the players punched through again.

This made Horunka Village the front line.

Generally speaking, the front line itself could only be sustained if it was a single step ahead of the rest of the players and no more.

Because of the fact that Horunka was basically a pocket, and was surrounded, there was no easy way to bring forward large amounts of items and supplies to the front liners to continue forward. A consistent supply line had to be established, and large numbers of players needed to be able to maintain it.

This made progressing further to the next city a near-impossible prospect for the time being. Because only the players currently at Horunka could take on that task. And even if there were enough skilled players for that to happen, there was definitely not enough supplies. The NPC shops in Horunka only had so much to go around.

And this was why keeping the roads clear was so important and why the front line couldn't be too far ahead. Player merchants needed to be able to make the journey themselves so that they could supply the necessary equipment to the front line clearers so that they could advance further.

It was all connected. And generally speaking, creating a pocket and having all the most experienced players migrate into it before it closed up was a pretty stupid thing to do. Especially since everyone that was left behind wouldn't understand how this all worked yet, and wouldn't be able to fight from their end any time soon due to their lack of experience.

There was no rear guard full of mid-level players yet. There were only extremes. Players with tons of experience, and players with none.

Pockets like this one rarely formed, and usually, before advancing, everyone tended to want the entire swarm blocking the path cleared out first.

But there was an exception here. The players currently in Horunka knew exactly what to expect on these first floors. Many of them had brought extra supplies knowing that they would not be able to get any more for some time. And Kirito expected that most of them were going to deliberately allow the road behind them to close up for good and focus forward instead.

It was a completely selfish idea, but by doing it this way, it would basically prevent most of the rest of the players from being able to get there over the next couple of days which would allow the players already there to widen the gap between them as much as possible. They'd complete all the best quests and steal all the xp, leaving nothing behind for the rest of the players when they finally did show up.

Nobody cared about working together yet. So isolating themselves from the rest of the players like they had was probably going to be the strategy that the beta testers would be following for the foreseeable future.

All the other players were inexperienced, so why not take shameless advantage of their inability to keep up?

That seemed to be the prevailing mindset.

Players lined the streets. The inns had been overloaded, so many took the opportunity to set up tents in the streets outside. The whole village was a safe zone, so there wasn't too much concern about sleeping out in the open. Tents, when they were set up in a safe zone, couldn't be destroyed and could be effectively bolted to the floor to prevent them from being moved around by others. This meant that setting one up in the open and sleeping inside was generally seen as a pretty safe thing to do. Nobody else would be able to break through it or mess with you when you were asleep inside it, but it had a good number of drawbacks that prevented this option from being widespread.

You couldn't block out sounds, and you had little to no privacy. Anyone could walk up and tap on the side of your tent to bring up a menu declaring who owned it. Anyone with the Listening skill could also eavesdrop on you easily when you were inside and there were even ways to see inside them. You also lacked all the additional features that were common in inn rooms, like blacklisting and whitelisting specific players. But other than that, there was no way to somehow PK someone when they were inside one.

So when players didn't care about privacy, or when all the inn rooms in a town or village were full, tents tended to start appearing all over the area. Just like they had now.

There had to be at least a hundred players there already, Kirito estimated. Tents had lined the village's alleys and main square. The vast majority of these players had gone to sleep already. Horunka had been their 'end of the first-day' goal, so they had settled down as soon as they had made it there.

Only a tiny minority had decided to conduct further business as Kirito had. Most elected to simply wait until tomorrow before doing any quests or anything else of that nature.

Staying out of sight wasn't very difficult as most players that were outdoors were all inside their tents, which were sealed shut. So Kirito couldn't see inside, and they couldn't see outside. This allowed him to continue to use his Hide ability without any difficulty.

He was invisible. And this allowed him to make it all the way to the NPC's house without any incidents.

He entered the house and walked over to the NPC.

Without a word, he handed over the ovule. He had no idea what to expect, as the dialogue for orange players was clearly different from the dialogue for green players, but of all the things he had tried to anticipate, a tearful 'thank you', hadn't been one of them.

The NPC thanked him profusely, and with tears in her eyes, handed him the reward for the quest.

It was a relatively short affair. The conversation was short and to the point, and nothing special really happened. Despite the number of players in the village, none were in the house with him.

He received a text prompt proclaiming that the Secret Medicine of the Forest quest had been completed successfully, and an Anneal Blade, as well as a sizable chunk of experience, had been given to him as a reward.

When Kirito closed the prompt, another appeared. This time, it had proclaimed that he had levelled up, and was now level 5.

But if he were being honest, he wasn't sure that he really cared at the moment. It was an amazing achievement to get all the way there in a single day, but he was having difficulties… processing things. The past few hours of his life had been so mentally and physically draining that the realization that he was now almost certainly the strongest player in the game had had no real effect on his mood.

He really just wanted to find a quiet corner somewhere so that he could go to sleep. But realistically, he knew that he still had a lot of work left to do before he could do that.

So without another word, he stepped back out of the house and made his way back into the forest where he had come from.

* * *

He needed to find a place to sleep. He would not be able to rent anything from the NPCs, so he'd have to make do with something out in the field. Setting up a tent in the safezone back there like the others had wasn't an option.

If he set one up, he would not remain hidden for long. Anyone would be able to see that a player named Kirito was inside, and that would bring all sorts of trouble. Nobody could tell, just from inspecting another player's tent, what cursor colour that player had, but that wasn't the issue here. It was instead the fact that his name was relatively well-known.

If someone discovered that he was there, that information would spread, and there would be a lot of attention placed on him. Under such scrutiny, he would not be able to hide his cursor for long. So to avoid this cascade of events, he could not stay in that village.

But he did have an idea or two. He just needed to find a good spot that was out of the way, first.

He had his new Anneal Blade equipped and was walking in a seemingly random direction.

To find a temporary spot to live, he had looked at his map of the floor. Most of it was blank, without any details filled in, but a large section of it had been filled out. Map data was automatically gathered as a player explored a new area. But even without any data at all, a general outline of the floor, without any fine details, was provided.

With that outline, he was even able to determine a general location for where the floor dungeon was likely located. Nobody could realistically get there yet, but he knew where to look for it when the player's eventually made it over there. It was in the north, but he couldn't make out precisely where. There was some randomness involved in its exact location but the entrance always spawned near a specific type of rugged, mountainous terrain―which could be seen easily on his map.

At the moment though, he wasn't really concerned about getting to the dungeon yet. He'd make his way there eventually, but he needed to give the rest of the players a chance to clear the path first. In the meantime, he needed to find a secluded location.

He wasn't really sure what he was looking for. He had a general idea, but he mostly just intended to explore and make do with whatever he came across. A lot of different places could provide what he needed.

To begin his search, he had started by taking a look at his map and asking the question, 'what is the most out of the way location that nobody would ever have any reason to go to?' The answer to that question would determine where the best spots would be.

By avoiding any wide-open areas and any open roads, he would not have to contend with any huge swarms of monsters and could live in relative peace. And he could also stay away from players, so the more isolated he could get, the better.

He was trying to maximize the distance between himself and the nearest settlement. So he would be going out of his way to get into the toughest, most annoying, barely manageable terrain that he could find and would be diving headfirst into it.

It was the only way.

The floor was massive, and there were a lot of places that looked promising based on his limited map data. Even after a month of playing in the beta, a lot of the first floor had gone unexplored, so Kirito didn't actually know where he was going. He was travelling in a seemingly random direction.

Players from all over the internet had shared their map data during the final few days of the beta test and had created an open-source map that was available to everyone, online. But even that hadn't been enough to complete the floor map. It had gotten most of it, but not all.

Kirito had spent a lot of time looking over it during those last few days. So he had a pretty good idea where most of the mini-dungeons and quests were located, as did most of the other beta-testers. But he also had a pretty good memory of which locations had not been filled in at all because nobody had ever gone there for one reason or another.

Most of these places had been deemed too useless to explore. Most players only had an interest in finding the floor's main dungeon, after all. So while there existed smaller dungeons all over the floor, and other worthwhile ventures, finding them had not been the priority of the front-liners back then.

There were tons of missed opportunities to be found, and Kirito was hoping to find one now. Mini dungeons had safe zones in them, after all. So if Kirito could find one, he would have a place where he could safely sleep. He'd just use the exact same tent strategy that the players back in Horunka had used.

But only out-of-the-way, undiscovered mini-dungeons could work for this. All of the good ones that were well known Kirito was sure were being picked clean at that very moment by the other beta's. Or they would be in the coming days.

He would not want to be there, sleeping in his tent, when that happened.

So that was the plan. Ideally, he would find an out of the way safe zone that nobody would be visiting for at least a couple of days. Just to give him enough time to settle down and come up with a longer-term plan.

The area he was heading to now was so out of the way that most wouldn't ever want to go there at all. The closest village was over an hour away, through a thick forest, and there was no path at all. It was actually so thick in some parts, that there had been no obvious way to squeeze through at all. Kirito had had to backtrack several times and squeeze through some extremely thin gaps between trees.

' _Now if only I can find something…'_

Everything he had ever learned about MMOs was telling him that he should be able to.

During all of his gaming experience, there was never a time where such a vast amount of land went simply unused. Whether it was messy terrain or not, something always tended to be there. If a place seemed empty in a game, it usually only meant that its secrets hadn't been discovered yet.

He had actually already passed by a few false alarms. He had found three separate, suspiciously hollowed out trees, and he had found a few places where a layer of thick bushes was concealing what was essentially a pitfall.

Seeing these sorts of things was usually a good sign that there was a quest or some sort of event nearby. And that would usually lead to a dungeon or some other area with a safezone.

Even running into a tripwire or some other sort of trap would be good for him. No player could have levelled up enough in one day to already be deploying those sorts of things, so it would mean that an NPC must be doing it. And that would probably lead to a quest of some sort, which would, in turn, almost certainly lead to a mini-dungeon since there were no other NPC settlements in the area. Quest NPCs didn't usually stand around in the middle of nowhere. They almost always resided close to a village or dungeon. And since there were no villages...

If he couldn't find anything, then he still did have a backup plan. He did know where a good number of safe zones were, but they were all well known. So he wouldn't be able to stay there for more than a day or so before expecting to see someone else. They were also pretty far away still, so he wanted to avoid going to them.

He kept searching through the dense brush.

The area he was navigating through was so thick that nothing could spawn. This was another reason why, in all likelihood, it had never been explored in the beta. If the whole area was empty and had no monsters, what good was it?

Kirito glanced at his map once again.

He was officially in unexplored territory. In fact, he was only a few kilometres away from the western edge of the floor. It had taken players in the beta quite some time to make it that far out. Nobody else had any reason to go. Everything important was clustered toward the center of the floor and in the North and South. Nothing major really existed in the East and West. No towns, anyway. So he would be very surprised if he ran into someone anytime soon.

One of the main things that worried him now, however, was whether or not any of the good spots he was looking for were unlocked yet. Like, for example, maybe to 'see' the entrance to a hidden, nearby area, you had to have 'such and such' quest completed from floor 9.

Aincrad was meant to be explored by 10,000 players for potentially years. So. who knew how many hidden places he had already passed by and simply had not had the requirements to enter?

If all this land he was pushing through was all truly empty, then there was a lot of wasted space.

Just as he was thinking this, the trees radically thinned out, and he found himself standing on top of a large boulder. The forest continued on just ahead at a lower elevation and at a reasonable thickness. Monsters would be able to spawn again.

Kirito jumped down from the boulder onto the ground below. Since the boulder looked a little out of place, he intended to investigate it to see if there was anything there. Upon landing on the ground, he turned around and froze in surprise.

Because it wasn't a boulder at all. It was a cave entrance.

' _Have I finally found something worthwhile?'_

If it was a mini-dungeon, then when he walked inside it would say on his map what the dungeon was called and he would unlock a new submap for the floor.

Opening up his inventory, he pulled his torch again and lit it up. Slowly, he began to make his way into the cave, sword in one hand, torch in the other. Despite the circumstances, he couldn't help but feel a little bit of excitement well up inside him.

The cave went straight for about 10 meters before curving left sharply… straight into a wall.

There was nothing there. After checking his map again, he confirmed― with some disappointment― that it wasn't a mini-dungeon of any kind. He even ran his fingers along the back wall but… nothing. Just an empty cave.

He let out a sigh.

He was presented with a choice just then. The place was decent. Not good, but not terrible either. And it was the first suitable location he had found.

So he could leave the cave and keep looking for a safe zone, or he could stay where he was. The cave wasn't completely safe by any means and it would pose some risk sleeping there, but he could do it. He even had a plan to mitigate a lot of that risk.

But leaving to continue his search had its own set of problems. Unless he went back the way he came, he would have to battle monsters everywhere he went due to the thinned out trees on this section of the floor, and he really didn't feel like doing that at the moment. He was tired. And he may not ever end up finding anything better.

Was it better to settle for something good enough? Or to continue in hopes of something better?

The efficiency-oriented gamer within him perked his head out and decided for him a moment later.

Continuing to look for safe zones when he already had a place that he could work with was xp waste. If he stayed, he could go to sleep sooner, which meant he could wake up sooner and begin grinding.

* * *

The cave was shaped like a backwards 'r'. There was nothing inside, and the only source of light had been his torch. After confirming that the cave was empty, though, he had put that torch away to conserve its remaining durability and had sat down in the darkness with his back against the wall so that he could think.

Technically speaking, he could use any open space for his next plan. But being inside this cave, in particular, had a few advantages that being in the open did not. For one, he would not be immediately visible to either monsters or players in the area when he was.

However, to be fair, any player that came all the way out here would immediately notice the cave and go to investigate it, just as Kirito had, so this wasn't really a good enough reason on its own. In fact, he'd almost consider it an unnecessary risk in that sense. As any player in the area would almost immediately find him.

He'd be much harder to find if he tried sleeping in the super dense trees in a random, out of the way location. If he set himself up 20 or 30 meters into the treeline in a pocket of space just big enough for him to comfortably lie down in, nobody would ever find him. The trees would be too thick for monsters to spawn nearby, and players would have to scrounge through the whole forest. And they wouldn't even know to look there. It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

But despite such an obvious advantage, there were a few small, but important things that stopped him from doing this.

The first of which was the fact that he needed an area that was as close to pitch black as possible so that he could train his Hiding skill whenever he wanted to. In the cave, he had a huge advantage in this respect because no matter what time of day it was, Kirito could make it as dark as he wanted to by simply blocking off the entrance with a piece of fabric―he had the materials―and retreating right into the back corner. He could make it much darker inside the cave than outside in the forest, even under that thick canopy.

In the trees, it was only as dark as inside the cave when the sun wasn't out. During the day, however, the sun would penetrate through the leaves. So that area would not provide the conditions necessary for training the Hiding skill during that time of day. Not even if Kirito set up a tent and camouflaged it and sat inside. Just as in real life, the sunlight would penetrate through the tent walls.

To be as efficient as humanly possible, Kirito wanted to be training as many skills as possible, for as long as possible, and during every bit of free time that he had. Even now, he had Hide active as he sat planning this all out. He never wanted to find himself in a situation where he was stuck with nothing to do due to it being too bright outside to turn on his Hide ability.

But perhaps the most important fact was the mobility that being in the cave provided.

If he needed to, he could be in and out of the cave and into the open area outside in seconds. This was not the case when he was hidden away in the trees, though. To get any real protection from players with the Searching skill who were scanning the treeline, Kirito would have to go in at least 20 or 30 meters deep before setting up. That would cost him a minute or two in travel time every single time he tried to go anywhere.

In just 10 days of that, he'd lose 20 minutes that he could have otherwise spent grinding just by going to and from his hiding spot once a day. After a month, he'd lose an hour.

So while it may not have looked like it at first glance, Kirito's decision to set up inside this cave was the result of a pretty extensive cost-benefit analysis rather than simply being a result of wandering into the first place he saw.

He was willing to increase the odds of being found by a little bit if it meant that he could squeeze out more training time in the long run by doing so.

He had to draw the line somewhere. The more extreme, paranoid, and rigid his plans to hide from the world became, the more careful he would have to be. Which meant that there would be less time in which he could train and level up. So there was a balance that had to be struck.

To achieve the goal of surviving until the end of the game, he had to honestly consider the option of doing literally nothing. Of never training at all and just hiding, forever, out in the woods and waiting for the other players to complete the game for him.

If he did that then sure, he'd almost surely never be found, but he wouldn't gain any strength either.

And while this might not, necessarily, be a bad thing if he was just trying to survive until the end of the game, he didn't know what the future would hold. Maybe there would come a time where he needed a lot of strength for some reason. Maybe due to a disaster on the front lines where all the best players were wiped out, massively setting everyone back, and forcing him into a position where he would need to pick up where they had left off or else face remaining trapped in the game forever. But if he had just sat out on the sidelines until then, he would not be in any position to do that. He'd have missed out on too much and would have to spend months grinding just to catch up to where he should have been. And only then would he be able to start progressing forwards through the game again.

Or maybe one day, despite all his efforts to hide, someone would get supremely lucky and stumble upon him anyway. Kirito would probably then be too weak to defend himself.

So he had to draw that line somewhere. Between taking extreme measures in never being found, and getting stronger. The problem was, though, that there was no correct place to draw it, as far as he could tell. Only hindsight could tell him what he should have done. Everyone would have a different opinion, so he could only go with what felt right to him. And for him, that meant gaining strength as rapidly as humanly possible, even if that meant increasing the odds of him being found by a little.

He would still be pretty damn hard to find all the way out there, anyway. And besides, he still had another contingency plan up his sleeve if this happened.

He just needed to set it up.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Eiri Fllyn**


	4. Insomnia

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito opened up his menu and glanced at the time.

4:00 a.m.

It was cold. Really cold.

Now that he had settled down in his cave for a little bit, Kirito had begun to hear the faint sound of monsters moving around in the distance. They were far away, but the sound carried. And he knew that if he lit a fire, there was a good chance that he would start attracting them. It would light up the entrance of the cave and the monsters would notice that, and slowly make their way over.

It would also decrease the effectiveness of his Hide ability. He was still using it, after all, rendering himself invisible, in the off-chance that something, or someone, suddenly stumbled upon his new hideout.

He wasn't looking forward to the next few hours. He was tired and hungry, and he couldn't focus properly while he was. But at the same time, he couldn't safely fall asleep yet. He had to implement his strategy first before he could, and that would take some time.

Kirito skimmed through the various options on his menu and spent some more time looking through everything in his inventory.

He had three leather vests, and he was wearing them all in layers. One of them he had bought with his starting money. The second had been from the crasher. The third had belonged to that other guy―the one who stabbed him back in the forest. He had picked that one up from the ground after that player had died, and now made use of it himself.

The game only allowed you to equip one item per slot, but you could still sort-of-wear things, despite them not being formally equipped. The mechanics of it were strange. Kirito only received the armour bonus from the vest he had equipped, even though he was wearing two others at the same time. Those two were considered 'held items' by the game and were only useful in his situation as a way to keep warm.

He also had 4 swords on him. His starting sword, which was almost completely degraded, his new Anneal Blade, the starting sword he had gotten off the crasher, and the one he had picked up from the guy in the forest.

He also had some basic cooking supplies.

Kirito had picked them up earlier, impulsively, having wanted to test out if there were any updates on the tastes of different foods since the beta.

It was a bit of a strange purchase for a player like him, someone who was so efficiency-oriented. But while eating was xp waste, so was logging out. And so was needlessly travelling. So picking up the supplies had been part of a long-term strategy.

The NerveGear made you feel hungry, and it did so in an unnatural way. In the real world, if you were hungry, you could generally ignore the hunger pangs for a while and, provided you weren't starved, they would eventually go away even if you didn't eat anything. But the ones from the NerveGear were not like this. They were constant and incredibly annoying to have to deal with. If you tried to ignore them, you wouldn't be able to think about anything else.

There was no option to not eat. You just had to, or the urge would never leave you alone.

And there were two main ways in which you could stop the hunger once you started feeling it. You could log out and go eat in the real world, or you could eat in the game world.

The hunger mechanics in the game were incredibly complicated. The NerveGear understood how hungry your real body actually was, and it generated hunger pangs somewhat based off of that to encourage you to go eat if you needed to.

But you could also use in-game meals as a stop-gap to temporarily stave it off. There were limits to this, of course. If you were absolutely and utterly starving, or malnourished, the NerveGear would detect that and wouldn't even let you log into the game at all for safety reasons. Or it would boot you out if you were already logged in at the time. But if you were still okay, and healthy, it almost encouraged you to forgo eating so that you could keep playing.

It made people lose weight.

And this was why food was so valuable a resource. Eating in the game was much faster than having to log out and eat in the real world. So buying cooking supplies and using them to prepare meals was more efficient in the long run.

He had only visited that store in the starting city one time, and he had picked up everything he had expected to need for the foreseeable future at that time. Even cooking supplies that he had had no intention of using for quite some time.

His plan for the previous day had been to log out and go eat dinner with his family. This wasn't technically efficient, but he couldn't just ignore his obligations in real life so he could play more SAO.

He hadn't expected to be able to do any of these hunger-skipping strategies until at least the following day. But he had not wanted to turn back and go to the NPC shops again. So he had bought this stuff in advance to avoid needless travel time to and from the store when he could otherwise be training.

He was very grateful now that he had since he would not be able to buy any food in his current situation even if he wanted to. Finding something to eat would have been much more difficult if he hadn't done this.

He had killed a ton of edible creatures already, such as dire wolves and boars. A lot of uncooked meat was sitting in his inventory as a result. Without a Cooking skill, his success rate at converting it all into cooked meat would be low, but due to the sheer quantity he'd be throwing over a fire, he was bound to succeed enough times to keep himself fed for the foreseeable future. So that problem was mostly sorted out already, and he wouldn't have to worry too much about it.

He also had a ton of junk. Drops that weren't very useful or valuable. Items that were only important to different types of players like Crafters, or Blacksmiths. If he hadn't been orange, he would have sold it all off in bulk. But in his current situation, many of these junk items could now be extremely important. He could make various tools out of them that would help him out a lot, provided that he had the right skills selected.

This had been a painful realization back when he had made it. Both of his skill slots were already occupied with skills that he could not afford to give up. But he needed to set himself up with all of the items that he would need in the future. A tent, a sleeping bag, warmer clothes, various tools, etc.

So he needed a new skill slot. He had tried finding a way around it―even briefly considering just accepting the loss and dropping one of his other skills temporarily―but he had decided against it in the end.

His One-Handed Sword was critical for his survival, for obvious reasons. He couldn't fight effectively without it. But his Hiding skill was just as important, especially now that he had a way to power-level it.

He had discovered this by accident. The longer he was invisible, the faster he accumulated experience in Hiding. It was like a multiplier that slowly increased the longer he kept his camouflage up, and that reset, if it ever deactivated.

Nobody had ever discovered this in the beta. Or if they had, they certainly hadn't mentioned it publicly. And this was likely because the effect was only noticeable after several hours of keeping the ability active.

But this mechanic was the other reason why he didn't want to remove the skill, even if only temporarily. His camouflage had already been up for several hours without being broken, and it would be a massive waste of time to have to restart now. So he intended to level it up by leaving it on overnight, potentially for several days in a row.

The downside of this levelling method, however, was that he couldn't do anything else in the meantime. If he started fighting, Hide would deactivate, and his multiplier would reset. So he could only interact with his menu and keep himself hidden from the rest of the world until he decided to call it quits. But at the same time, he needed to be ready in the event of an emergency, so he couldn't remove his One-Handed-Sword skill even if he planned on not using it for the time being.

Since he couldn't lose either of his skills, he needed a new slot. Otherwise, he'd risk losing an entire day, which in the early game was huge.

So that was his plan.

If he wanted any sleep, he first needed to reach level 6 as quickly as possible. He'd unlock his third skill slot with that. Then he would use that slot to hop between all the various skills that he needed to process the items in his inventory into the tools and equipment that he needed to survive. He knew all the crafting recipes from his time in the beta, so he didn't expect it to take too long.

But it would be so annoying. SAO severely punished solo players in that respect. The game was designed to encourage cooperation between players as much as possible, so many tasks required lots of different skills to complete them. This was supposed to translate into having a close-knit group of players to work with, but in Kirito's case, it just translated into a mess of needless, tedious skill-hopping to get around the game mechanics.

So he'd pick up one skill, complete the task that he needed with it, then swap it out for a new one. Then he'd repeat the process until he finished creating everything. And for good measure, to future-proof himself and to prevent ever having to do any of it again, he'd make multiple copies of each piece of equipment. Since it could all be stored in his inventory, he didn't have to worry about the consequences of carrying around multiple tents with him at any moment.

He'd pick up an actual third skill when he was done. Something that wasn't useless. But he'd make that decision later. Then, when he was finished with all of this, he'd finally be able to get some sleep.

Kirito glanced at the final three items in his inventory.

He had hit the rare drop table exactly once so far, but not for anything useful. Just a random piece of ore that could be used by mid-level blacksmiths. He didn't know what it was used for, though. Just that it was important to those types of players. Ordinarily, he'd have sold it off for a decent amount.

But even though he had only hit the rare drop table once, he had two other rare items in his inventory, neither of which he had gotten on his own. He had picked them up from the corpses of the two players he had had close encounters with.

One of them was a dagger. It was decent quality, and it was another weapon in his arsenal, but he didn't really like using daggers. He'd use it if all of his swords broke and he didn't have a replacement, but only then.

The other one was interesting though. A Teleport Crystal.

It was ironic. Kirito was one of the only players in the entire game that couldn't make use of it. If he tried, he'd land in a city and get attacked by the guards. And it irritated him quite a bit, having one. You couldn't even get them on the first floor by conventional means. You could only get them as a rare drop, and only if you were very, very lucky.

He'd be surprised if there were any more currently in the game. He probably had the first one. He could have made so much money off of it too if he could just sell the thing. But he wouldn't be able to. Nobody would trade with an orange player like him.

So he intended to just keep it for emergencies. He'd use it if he was moments from death, and would surely die if he didn't. But then he'd have to pull off another escape through the crowded city he'd appear in. Since he had almost died the last time that had happened, he wasn't looking forward to having to do it again, so he needed to ensure that it wouldn't happen.

He needed to be much more prepared to face emergencies now, and carefully consider each of his moves.

Standing up with a plan in mind, Kirito finally made his way out of the cave. It was still dark outside, but it was nowhere near as dark as it used to be. The sun wasn't up just yet, but despite that, the surrounding area had gotten brighter. Bright enough that Kirito would not have to worry about losing track of any cursors or losing his way in the forest.

He wouldn't need his torch, in other words, and would be able to fight freely.

* * *

When Kirito reached the monsters and noticed what they were, he was pretty surprised. But in hindsight, he probably shouldn't have been. They were Nepenthes, but they were bigger than the ones he had faced earlier.

The name had been a giveaway, yet nobody had figured it out. _Little_ nepenthes were what the ones near Horunka Village were called. The ones in front of him now were just called nepenthes. So they did not have a descriptor telling them how big they were. Or how small.

Nobody had ever made it to this location in the beta. If someone had, Kirito would have heard about the place at some point.

' _Do these ones drop the ovule, too?'_

Had Kayaba just been sitting back and laughing at the beta testers back then, grinding and grinding on those puny, little nepenthes near Horunka, agonizingly slowly, to get that ovule, when there were bigger ones much further out that had a much more reasonable drop rate?

The quest he had completed earlier had specified that he needed to kill nepenthes, and it had said that there were some in the forest nearby. It did not say that that was the only location where they lived, nor did it say that the nepenthes he needed to kill had to be little.

At least he had the place to himself. There were no nearby towns, villages, or rest stops, so nobody would have any reason to come over. At least, Kirito hoped that nobody else would come. There were 10 times more players in the game now that he thought about it, and they were all on the same floor. The odds of someone randomly wandering over were much higher than he would have liked as a result.

' _Wait a minute,'_ Kirito paused.

If these nepenthes dropped the ovule, then there may also be some with the exploding fruit. Possibly even a bigger exploding fruit that could be even more dangerous.

He needed to be careful during this, he realized.

Readying his Anneal Blade, Kirito carefully scanned the area. When he was ready, he attacked the closest Nepenthe.

* * *

Kirito found himself in a bit of a bind. Back when he had started the Secret Medicine of the Forest quest in Horunka, the only reason he had been able to fight the nepenthes at all was because of his prior knowledge. It was generally considered to be a bad idea to grind out hundreds of monsters that were a higher level than you at such a low level, but he had managed because of his prior experience.

But it had still been difficult. These new ones he was fighting now felt about as hard as the ones back then, relatively speaking. So his increased strength didn't feel very significant. It still took three hits from his sword to kill them, even though he was using his new one. Their cursors were red, indicating that, as high of a level as he currently was, these monsters were still higher.

Most were level 7, but he had seen one or two that had been level 8 in the area. So there was some variation between them. There were also a handful of little nepenthes interspersed throughout. They were level 3 and usually went down in single hits.

But just as Kirito had predicted, these larger nepenthes had special variants. There was one in the clearing at the moment that carried an exploding fruit, and this fact was the result of his new internal debate.

He had been fighting these things for over an hour now, and he was still only about halfway to level 6. He could see the glow from the morning sun already, and he wanted this to go by faster. Since he knew that the odds of a special Nepenthe appearing were directly proportional to the amount of nepenthes he had already killed, he knew that they were starting to become more common due to the sheer number that he had defeated already.

He would start to see a lot more fruits, and a lot more flowers, if he kept fighting them. And this had given him a pretty reckless idea that he would have never even considered, had he been green.

These early days of the game were critical. Every level he pulled ahead from the next highest levelled player, the better off he would be. Since he had no support from anyone, he needed to be ready to be able to fight off entire parties of players single-handedly. He needed to get more skill slots, and he needed to get stronger. And he had to do it as quickly as possible.

The best rate of experience per hour that Kirito had reached in this game so far, as dangerous as it had been, had been when he was fighting those Nepenthe swarms back near Horunka.

He glanced at the fruited Nepenthe.

If he hit that fruit, it would explode, and a swarm of nepenthes would attack him from all sides. But if he survived again, he would likely be level 6. It was a huge gamble, and he wasn't sure if he should take it. He had never been in this area before, so he wasn't sure if the fruit would do what he expected it to do. And he had no idea just how many would spawn in.

But he had practiced fighting swarms of monsters and felt like he could handle things a lot better now. Especially since there weren't any other players trying to kill him, lurking nearby. He wasn't in the red zone, and he had a plan. He had some health potions and even had that Teleport Crystal if things got ugly.

It would also provide him with valuable information. If he could do this, and succeed, he could repeat the method as many times as he wanted. You just couldn't get experience rates like that unless you were soloing a dungeon.

It was too big an opportunity to pass up, he eventually decided.

Kirito opened his inventory and took out one of the throwing knives he had taken off of that crasher he had killed earlier.

He didn't have the Blade Throwing skill, but he could still throw one and do damage to things with it. It just wouldn't do very much. His accuracy would also not be improved by the system. It'd be just like throwing a stone.

He took one last glance around the clearing to confirm his escape routes. Then he mentally repeated the steps of his plan, took a deep breath, and threw the knife.

A massive _Pop!_ sounded off through the clearing as the fruit burst.

* * *

This time, Kirito had no intention of getting surrounded. He immediately sprinted away from the clearing and towards his cave. There was a wide-open field in front of it, and he could climb to higher ground if things got too intense.

His cave was within earshot of the clearing he had just been fighting in, but it was still a ways away. At his top speed, he could make it there in around 30 seconds.

He scanned the trees around him as he ran, and saw a _lot_ of red cursors. For a brief moment, he had some doubts about whether what he had done had been a good idea, but those doubts faded when he made it out of the treeline without incident, and into the open field.

All of the nepenthes were coming at him from just one direction, now. He also had the entire clearing to fight in. It seemed much more manageable than the last time.

He scanned the area behind him one last time to ensure that no red cursors were coming from that direction. But as expected, he didn't see any. The trees on that side were so thick that Kirito had barely been able to squeeze through them himself. There was no way one of these giant plants could have managed. So he turned back around and braced himself for the wave of red that was about to hit him.

His strategy was the same as before.

Hit and run. Don't get surrounded, group them up into a circular swarm, and run loops around them. Attack each one a single time and move on to the next target to avoid the acid wave.

He had come up with that strategy instinctively, earlier, and it had saved his life. It was time to put it to the test once again, but this time, on larger enemies.

When the first wave of enemies reached him, he didn't attack immediately. Instead, he carefully observed, and maneuvered around them, dodging each of their attacks as they clustered together and started trying to follow him. He remained just out of their attack range, but always within their sight.

He kept it up for a few, full minutes. Refusing to attack or retreat. Simply pooling them all together, until they were all right behind him. He was constantly checking to see if anything was different due to the larger exploding fruit.

Only after taking a quick glance into the forest to ensure that there were no more cursors on their way over, did Kirito finally start in on them.

They weren't very fast, so they had a hard time keeping up with him. Since he wasn't stuck between two rings of them like he had been back near Horunka, he only had to dodge acid attacks from one direction.

But there were a few noticeable differences this time that did come as a surprise.

The Nepenthes were constantly swinging around their vines. However, because these Nepenthes were much larger than the ones back at Horunka, these vine attacks caused a ton of friendly fire. It wasn't just due to their larger hitboxes, though. These nepenthes also had longer and thicker vines as well. And all of these factors contributed.

The Little Nepenthes had been too small for sustained friendly fire to take place.

Then there was the other advantage. The fruit that had burst here had produced fewer enemies than the one back at Horunka. And this made some sense to him. Because these Nepenthes were stronger, to compensate, a fruit would spawn less of them.

And this was a great thing because it tightened up the cluster. The larger hitboxes did not make up for the smaller diameter of the swarm due to the smaller number of enemies being collected.

This made everything way easier. He did not run into any instances of the swarm breaking apart due to the ones at the back being too far away.

It didn't take very long at all for Kirito to realize the amazing potential behind this idea. It was so much easier to run the loop here than back at that village. He knew that it would be a fantastic strategy if he could optimize it.

Friendly fire was going to skyrocket his xp rates to completely new heights.

It all came down to a single fact. Even if 99% of a Nepenthe's HP was depleted by the friendly fire of another Nepenthe, as long as Kirito was the only player that was fighting them, and as long as he got the last hit in, he would still get the full xp from the kill.

So by luring them around in a circle like this, he caused them to inflict massive amounts of damage on themselves. But all of that extra DPS worked _for_ him. It was as if there were 5 or even 10 other Kirito's in the area, all fighting together, and he was getting all of that xp for himself. Since monsters were not players, the xp would not be split. It had nowhere else to go other than Kirito.

So they were like fish in a barrel. As long as he didn't make any stupid mistakes, he could keep this up for as long as he wanted to.

So he did. He ran circles around the cluster, dodging the occasional vine or acid attack, and he allowed them to damage themselves in the meantime, intervening only at the proper moments to speed things along.

The swarm scrambled over itself, trying to attack him back.

They did not cooperate at all, though. If they had worked as a team, a strategy like this wouldn't have worked. But they were mindless and predictable, and they all competed with each other when trying to attack him.

Kirito ran his loops in a single direction around the perimeter of the swarm. But after each loop, he had to retreat a short distance due to the shape he traced out on the ground with his path. He wasn't running a perfect circle. So on average, he found himself slowly drifting back towards his cave.

But this was a simple matter to fix. He'd just change his route up a little bit and lead them in a new direction. Space was not an issue, so he could simply start leading them back towards the trees when he was running out of room, and they would follow after him when he did.

The path he ended up settling into was very similar to the shape of what he imagined the moon's path around the sun would look like when viewed from above. The swarm of nepenthes was the Earth, and it travelled in a lazy ellipse around the sun. And he was the moon, rapidly spinning around the earth as it did so. And the sun was located in the middle of the empty clearing somewhere.

He was running in a circle that was itself circling the clearing. They slowly made their way to the trees, turned a little, then slowly made their way back to his cave.

It was a loop that could be repeated as many times as he wanted to. But after running it a few times, the first few nepenthes started to die from all of the accumulated damage, and shortly thereafter, every new sword skill saw another dead Nepenthe. The swarm passed by some invisible boundary, a critical mass of HP, where they could all suddenly be taken down rapidly. As if Kirito were now suddenly battling against cardboard cutouts or mannequins.

He could just dive headfirst into the swarm at that point and tear it to shreds with ease, causing him to practically be blasted by a firehose of xp. In a matter of seconds, the swarm went from dozens to less than five.

Five sword skills later, and the clearing was empty again.

Kirito hadn't been hit once.

It hadn't been perfect. Some of the Nepenthes had ended up dying due to friendly fire before Kirito had been able to sneak the last hit in. So he had still missed out on a small amount of xp, but this amount was dwarfed by the amount he had received.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie,**


	5. Escape Velocity

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito was sprinting through the trees towards his cave with a shit-eating grin plastered across his face and a swarm of red cursors right behind him.

 _Of course,_ he was going to do it again. It had not taken long at all for another fruited Nepenthe to show up after he had started looking for one again. Only another 20 minutes or so. The adrenaline rush from his previous loop had woken him up, and the feeling of fatigue that he had had all morning had faded. So he hadn't crashed after his last loop the way he had expected to.

He was on a roll at the moment. He just had this feeling in him now. One that told him that if he stopped utilizing this strategy now, then when he tried it again later, it just wouldn't be as effective. He didn't know why he felt that way, but things like that had happened to him before in other games. He had come up with cool strategies before, only for them to, for some reason, not work as well the next day when he tried to replicate them.

It just wouldn't work, and he'd have no idea why. The magic, for lack of a better word, of doing the strategy for the first time just wouldn't be there. He wouldn't be in the zone, and it just wouldn't work as well.

This felt like one of those situations. So he intended to keep it up until he couldn't do it anymore. He was focused, and everything was working perfectly so he didn't want to ruin it. He was afraid that if he stopped, he'd never be able to do it again.

It would be like waking up from an amazing dream. He could wake up at any time, but he wanted to stay a little longer.

So he would.

His Anneal Blade had a lot more durability than his starting sword did. So much more in fact, that he could keep this up every day for a week or so before it would finally break if his math was right.

He ran into the clearing by his cave once more, waited for them to arrive, and initiated his strategy.

Kite the Nepenthes while waiting for the rest to arrive, then start looping. He'd continue until the first few started dying, then he'd leap into the swarm and utterly exterminate the rest after reaching critical mass.

It took about 15 minutes this time to clear them out.

He counted 52 Nepenthes in that swarm. This meant that he was killing them at roughly twice the speed using this new method than he had been back when he was fighting them normally. That included the time it took to run to his cave, wait for them all to arrive and to kill them all.

So the experience per hour doing this could probably only be bested by soloing this floor's labyrinth.

This also meant that he was probably getting twice as much experience per hour than the next highest levelled player.

Unless there was someone else out there like him, who had found an exploit to get a lot of experience incredibly quickly, he was the strongest now.

With that in mind, Kirito made it his goal to always be at least 5 levels higher than the next strongest player.

* * *

He did it again.

...And again.

By his 5th run-through, he had noticed that there were many efficiency improvements that he could make.

If he avoided this particular rock in the field, the swarm wouldn't separate as much, and he didn't have to spend as much time recollecting them.

There were short windows of time where he could use two-hit sword skills instead of the single-hit ones he had been using all this time as well. He could sneak in an extra kill on those occasions and still have the time to spare to escape the counterattack that inevitably followed. It took a little bit of extra footwork to pull off, but he managed it just fine after some experimentation.

He also noticed that he didn't have to wait for them all to arrive before starting to kill them. He knew precisely how many would show up eventually, and knew precisely how long it took for them all to get there. Exactly 52, every single time. And he would run exactly 5 and a half loops before they would all be collected in the swarm.

But he didn't have to wait until then to start. If he started inflicting damage on them a half a loop early, there would still be no danger of being flanked from behind when he wasn't looking because the last few nepenthes would just be coming out of the treeline at that moment. This meant that by the time he circled again, he'd be back at the treeline exactly when a gap opened up in the stream of incoming monsters. There would be nothing there to take advantage of the fact that Kirito's back would be completely exposed because the last of the 52 would have just made it out of the forest and they would stop coming.

This would allow him to continue the loop from there without even slowing down, and it would ultimately shave off over a minute.

Then if he pulled in his loop a little tighter, closer to the swarm itself, he would be able to attack the group faster. He would not need to spend as much time repositioning himself after each attack when prepping for the next one, so there would be a few inches less distance to close. This shaved off a few fractions of second on every swing which added up in the long run.

More time could be saved if he tried to optimize his angle and position relative to the swarm itself. He wanted as many acid attacks and as many vine attacks to be launching as possible. This would ensure that the group was always inflicting damage to itself via friendly fire. So he had to always remain within their attack range.

But he had to be careful there as well. The amount of complexity involved in this strategy was hard to grasp. Kirito needed the group to damage itself, but he did not want any nepenthes to die unless they were by his hand, otherwise, the xp would be wasted. So there was this careful balancing act involved, and he had to pay close attention to all of the HP bars so that he could try and figure out exactly which nepenthe he needed to kill immediately, and which ones needed to be damaged by the others a little bit more first.

He could almost write an essay or give a lecture on all the intricacies and nuances involved in the loop now. It was not at all obvious how to optimize the process. But as he continued to do more and more loops, the kinks continued to be worked out one at a time and he was able to spot these small details through trial and error.

He didn't have to be as cautious anymore. He had been dodging more than he had needed to. If he killed a Nepenthe just before they released an acid attack, for example, it wouldn't fire. So instead of dodging, there were windows where he could attack instead, shaving off even more time.

The closer the swarm was to a perfect circle, and the tighter it was, the faster it would inflict damage on itself. The more oblong and spread out it was, the slower it would damage itself. And he had ways of modulating this depending on the circumstances by controlling his speed and position.

All of these efficiency improvements continued to pile up on top of each other. They stacked, each contributing a few more seconds to the time he saved every loop, and entire minutes were shaved off as a result by the end.

His goal was sub-10-minute loops now. He consistently reached 11 minutes, but he needed to go faster.

He had reached level 6 some time ago, but he didn't want to leave the area just yet.

* * *

During another typical loop, Kirito had seen something incredible. And it made him believe that sub-10-minute runs were not only possible but that he was on the cusp of something _far_ greater than even that.

One of the Nepenthes he had lured over to his cave had had another fruit on its head. This meant that he got two exploding fruits back-to-back with no wait time in between.

He had noticed that it was getting faster and faster for the next fruited Nepenthe to spawn each time he went looking for one, but he hadn't thought about the possibility of reaching some sort of escape velocity. Where the probability of a new fruited Nepenthe spawning was so high that it was practically guaranteed to spawn within the swarm that the previous fruited Nepenthe had called in.

This meant that he could just keep looping and looping in front of his cave endlessly, popping the next fruit whenever the number of Nepenthes in the swarm got too low, without ever having to waste time returning to the forest to look for another fruited one.

He was on the cusp of that. Nepenthe escape velocity. It would probably take a few more days of hard grinding to get there, but forget sub-10-minute loops, _that_ would be the next major efficiency improvement, and he needed to figure out a way to keep up with it.

Special Nepenthe spawn rate was directly proportional to a player's Nepenthe killcount, and it appeared to increase without limit. So the more you killed, the more special Nepenthe's you would see, which would eventually lead to 'Nepenthe Escape Velocity.'

It was just a matter of time now. And if he didn't have a strategy to keep up with the spawn rate ready by the time it happened, it would be too late. He would never again have a fruited Nepenthe spawn rate as low as he did right now. It would only ever increase.

So he needed to keep improving the speed of his kills so that he could remain ahead of the curve when that time finally arrived. If he didn't, when he reached escape velocity, the loop he was running would never terminate. There would always be more Nepenthes spawning in and he would never be able to just step back and say _'that's enough for now, I'm going to go take a break,'_ because the Nepenthes would just keep coming.

He had originally hoped that he could just decide to not destroy the next Nepenthe fruit that showed up to finally stop the loop when that happened, but Kirito wasn't the only one that could destroy that fruit. Stray Nepenthe vines could destroy it too. And there was so much friendly fire in the swarm that the fruit would almost always burst whether or not he attacked it himself.

It was a positive feedback loop that he couldn't control, and that was a massive problem on the horizon.

He had to get ahead of it.

* * *

Kirito had managed two more Nepenthe runs before finally crashing. His fatigue from pulling an all-nighter had finally caught up with him. He had gotten terrible times on both as a result. Each one hovering around the 13-minute mark.

So he called it quits for the day, hoping that the strategy would still work the next time he tried it.

Until then, he decided that he needed to go to sleep. But first, he needed to finally bite the bullet and make all of his equipment and tools.

So he sat down in his cave and got started.

First, he needed the Crafting skill. Since he was level 6 now, he had his extra skill slot. So he opened his menu and navigated to the public skill selection page.

Picking up a new skill was as simple as clicking on the one you wanted. However, only a small subset of every skill in the game appeared on this menu.

Most of the total skills that existed were unique or required certain quests or other requirements to unlock. And these unlockable skills, naturally, wouldn't appear in the public list of choosable skills for any player. There was a separate page for those. The private skill selection page that was unique to each player.

But Kirito's was currently empty. As was everyone else's. It was way too soon for players to expect to have anything listed there yet. All of the interesting quests with skill unlocks would be on the later floors.

The skills on the private skill selection menu were also all hidden. SAO wasn't like other MMOs in that sense, where a player could look up information on skills that they didn't have the requirements for. The unique skills in this game weren't even greyed out on the menu. They were unlisted. So it was completely unknowable how many unique skills existed, or what types there were, or what quests players should strive to complete to go after any of them. There was no information to guide a player's decisions as they picked up new skills and shaped their character builds.

So in the meantime, the only way for Kirito to pick up a new one at all was to go to the public menu that contained all the 'normal' skills.

Crafting was one of the ones listed there, so he picked it. It was required for what he wanted to do.

He had a list of items that he wanted at the end of this process. He wanted a tent, a sleeping bag, and a fur blanket.

While these things would make sleeping much more comfortable, there were also practical reasons behind choosing them as well. They weren't just luxuries. They could save his life.

When a player fell asleep in Aincrad, they were out of it completely. It was a near coma-like state that made the player completely unresponsive to their environment. You could poke a sleeping player and they wouldn't even feel it. You could physically pick them up and drag them somewhere. You could attack them, or even kill them if they weren't in a safe zone. It wasn't like real life where you would be jolted awake at the slightest sound or at being grabbed. You could literally die here by going to sleep in the wrong place because there was no sensory feedback from the NerveGear when you were unconscious.

Most of these issues were easily circumvented by sleeping somewhere safe―like at an inn, or later on in the game, at a player-owned house. These locations were special in the sense that you had control over who was allowed to enter and leave the premises. Inside an inn room, you could open up a properties window and toggle whether or not another player was allowed to go inside. You could blacklist certain players by name, or whitelist others, or do a whole host of other things at your leisure.

These rules were system-enforced. They were immutable, so nobody could break in, or do anything of that sort.

Some things were allowed, like eavesdropping through the door if your Listening skill was high enough, but a hard line was drawn at players breaking and entering. Someone with the Thieving skill, or some sort of Lockpicking skill, even if it was utterly maxed out and with every buff possible active, would still not be able to get into these places if they were not allowed to by the system.

It was perfect security.

Due to all of this control, it was obvious that everyone would make use of these features. It was so obvious that it was taken for granted. Since everybody used these features all the time, nobody ever really thought about what it would be like to not have access to any of them.

Kirito himself hadn't thought about it either until he had been forced into his current situation.

Where was the safe zone that he would be allowed inside?

There was none, as far as he could tell. Inns didn't allow orange players inside them. Maybe there was one out there somewhere that would, but it probably wouldn't be on the first couple of floors.

Maybe he could buy a house later on, but those were inordinately expensive and most were meant to be purchased by entire guilds, not individual players. It would also take extensive searching to find one that was suitable, as most purchasable buildings were inside towns. Which would mean that every time he walked out the front door of one of them, he'd run the risk of being attacked by NPC guards.

The closest thing he could do to finding a safe spot to sleep in was to find a mini-dungeon or something of the sort with no other players inside and sleep in the safe zone there. But even in this case, he'd still be running the risk of being dragged out of the safe zone by a player and PKed while he was asleep.

He could get around this with a tent. If he had one, he could go into the zone, bolt it to the floor, and nothing would be able to get to him. Probably. The tent itself was indestructible when it was protected by a safe zone. However, the fact of the matter was that just because nobody had figured out how to get through a tent's meagre protections when it was set up in a safe zone yet, didn't necessarily mean that it was impossible.

There might be an exploit. But in any case, this was still the best option for him in theory. The problem was, he could not go to any of the safe zones that he knew about. All of the mini-dungeons that had been explored in the beta would all be raided by the former beta-testers. If he set a tent up inside one, they could walk up to it and see who the item belonged to.

So no known safe zone was safe. He would have to find one, then, that had never been found before. But by their nature, he didn't know where those were. He would have to find something new and get lucky. But he couldn't rely on that in the short term, so this option was out.

To solve this problem, Kirito had needed to get clever.

He had really needed to put some thought into it. But he had a lot of time to think and go over the possibilities, so he had managed to come up with a plan. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best he could do for the foreseeable future.

It started with an observation.

When an item belonging to a player was destroyed, that player would receive a notification from the system. The player could then, if they wanted to, look through their message history and see it. Now, the thing about these notifications was that you could go into the system settings and set whether or not the notification would be accompanied by a chime-like sound.

So if hypothetically, Kirito was asleep, and during that time, an item belonging to him was destroyed, and if he had set up his notification settings properly, he would hear this sound. While it was true that there was no sensory feedback by the NerveGear when a player was unconscious, notifications got around this because there was nothing sensory about them. It was a system message, not audio from the game's environment.

So they could function as an alarm. One that went off whenever an item broke.

Alarms could be set through the game menu, but those were only timers. If you wanted to wake up at a certain time, you could set one of these to go off at that time. Like an alarm clock. But you couldn't set up some sort of motion detector or anything like that. Not by default. Maybe there was a skill for that, but he didn't know.

But by making use of the notification settings, he could create an alarm that would go off whenever an item of his was destroyed.

All that remained was to make use of this concept somehow.

How could he create a situation where someone attempting to murder him in his sleep would have no choice but to first destroy an item belonging to him and trigger this alarm?

By being inside a tent.

If a player or monster wanted to kill him while he was inside one, there would be no way for them to do so without destroying it or ripping through the wall. This was because Kirito could seal the entrance to it from the inside in such a way that there was no way to open it from the outside non-destructively. This would force them to trigger the notification and wake him up.

Now, he thought it was interesting how this situation worked. Tents did not have this sort of functionality built into them directly. This audio notification function that he would be taking advantage of was a property that all items had. Tents had no actual security built into them and as such, they were not safe places to use as a place to sleep while out in the wilderness. Only in safe zones did they have a use, but whenever you were in one there was almost always an inn room nearby that had much better privacy protections.

This meant that tents were seen as almost entirely useless, cosmetic items that had no real purpose except in niche situations like in cities or if you decided to camp out inside a dungeon for some reason. Back in the beta, nobody would ever do that. But now that he thought about it, some players might start now since nobody could log out. The hardcore grinders might. The people who thought that walking to and from cities to get an inn room was xp waste. But otherwise, no.

So ironically, Kirito had stumbled upon one of the only situations in which they could serve a genuine purpose, and that situation just happened to line up with how one would probably expect them to be used.

To camp out in the wilderness.

There were a few problems with this plan, however. In particular, audio notifications weren't all that loud. Even when he cranked up the volume on them there was a small chance that he wouldn't wake up from just one of them going off in his ear.

This was where additional items came in handy. If his tent breaking failed to wake him up, he would still be wrapped up in a sleeping bag and a blanket. And he also intended to create some pieces of fabric that he could stretch out over the mouth of his cave in such a way that they would have to be torn down for someone to get through, providing more opportunities for the game to wake him up.

So that was why these items were important enough to create. It was the only safe place he could think of where he could sleep. If not for this ability to create an alarm like this, Kirito would not be going through this process at all.

The other items he was making, a sleeping bag, and a fur blanket, were nowhere near as effective an alarm as his tent was because a clever serial killer would be able to pull him out from under them without destroying them if he was careful enough. But there were additional reasons why he was making them. Heat retention and comfort being one, but the final reason really came down to the fact that these items would be extremely easy to make while he was going through this tedious crafting process and he already had the spare materials to do so. They were just extra things that he could easily throw in.

As an analogy, if a person went to the grocery store for some necessities, it's easy for them to decide to buy other things that they didn't originally plan on picking up since they were already there and the items were now in front of them. Only a single reach away.

A similar idea applied here. Kirito was already going through all of these steps and through this crafting process to make his tent, and it just so happened that blankets and sleeping bags were made out of the same materials.

These items were modular in their construction. They shared common base components and only differed in the number and size of materials needed.

A tent took 8 pelts. A sleeping bag took 3. A blanket took only 1. But they were all the same pelts. They were just used in different crafting recipes with only minor modifications. Modifications that would only add a handful of minutes to the already lengthy procedure.

So why not? If he had a blanket and a sleeping bag he would definitely make use of them to stave off the cold. And Kirito already had all of these raw materials due to his Dire Wolf farming from earlier in the day, so he would not have to go picking up any new ones.

In fact, he had way more raw materials than he needed. And if he didn't make use of them now, since he couldn't foresee any way in which he could sell them off later, they would just end up sitting in his inventory for the rest of his time in the game. And that would feel like a wasted opportunity because he was never planning on picking up the Crafting skill again after this.

He wouldn't need it. Not even for maintenance on these items. Because these items were constructed modularly, Kirito could make a specific item that could be used to repair any of them, even if he didn't have the Crafting skill anymore.

It was an item created by modifying leather in a specific way. When he did so, he could create these special strips of cloth that could be used to repair any of these items of his since they were all made from the same things. Somewhere down the line, this stuff he was making was going to degrade into nothing. It'd take a while, but it would happen eventually. Items degraded when they were left out. But if he had these leather strips he could fix them up without ever needing to waste a skill slot and go through this process again.

All he had to do was use a strip on the damaged item. Then the item's durability would increase a specific amount, and the strip would vanish. Then he'd repeat as needed.

It was like... filling up a car with gasoline in that sense. Since he wasn't able to go to another gas station any time soon in this analogy, and he had a long distance to travel, he would get around the problem by filling up a bunch of extra barrels while he was already at the station. So when he ran out he'd have a reserve. And due to the sheer number of these strips he was going to make, he would be able to last for months out here, easily.

He could even calculate the exact number of days until then.

He knew the precise rate at which a tent degraded per hour. From there and with some simple math, he could calculate how much it would degrade per day. He also knew how much durability was repaired for each cloth strip, and he knew exactly how many he intended to make.

These were all the unknowns he needed to calculate an exact date at which all his items would degrade into nothing.

...Kind of.

Because after sitting down and working through these numbers, he quickly discovered that the calculation would be a lot more complicated then he had at first realized.

There were adjustable parameters that he had to control for.

If he decided to never repair his sleeping bag or his blanket―his nonessential items―they would then degrade to nothing long before his tent would. But as a consequence, he would be left with many extra strips which would extend the amount of time he could live out in the wild, significantly.

He also had to take into account the number of tents he expected to be destroyed in the middle of the night. If he only made one, and some random player tried to kill him in the middle of the night tomorrow, destroying said tent, he'd be screwed if he didn't have a backup. So he had to make a decision, now, about how many he expected to need.

And this complicated everything by an annoying amount. Because it was way more cost-effective to make lots of strips than it was to make lots of tents.

Returning to his car analogy from earlier, the problem could be seen like this. If he wanted to travel 1000 miles without ever needing to go to a gas station, there were two general approaches he could take to do it. He could buy one new car, then buy lots of extra containers of gasoline, or he could buy multiple cars, each with a full tank.

The first way looks way more reasonable than the second way. Unless you expect to crash a lot, anyway. Only then would the second way look better.

It wasn't a perfect analogy but it illustrated the point.

If he used the materials that would have been used for two tents and instead used them to make one tent and lots of strips, he would make it way, way further. But at the cost of having fewer backups.

So the whole situation turned into this complicated optimization problem with all sorts of decisions to make at every step. And it took way longer than he would have liked, to finally come up with a decision.

But he did eventually, and so he now had a list containing the quantities of each item he intended to make. And he now knew as a consequence that assuming every tent he had was destroyed except for one, and if he chose to not repair his non-essential items, he would last for exactly 197 days, including that day. This assumed that his items would be materialized outside of his inventory for 10 hours per day. This value mattered because there was no degradation when his items were inside his inventory. So by simply changing this number from 10 to 9, he would last several days longer. Ten seemed like a generous amount and a slight overestimation.

So a little over 6 months. But it would also depend on the number of backup tents that ended up not being needed if he made it that far. So he could make it a bit longer. And he might even lose all of his tents way before then.

But he was pretty sure that the distribution of materials and items that he was creating was a good balance.

He couldn't just click on the raw materials and be done with the whole thing just like that, though. If he could have done that, he wouldn't be dreading this whole procedure as much as he was.

It was nowhere near that simple.

The creation of these items required several, time-consuming, intermediary steps, and a ridiculous amount of logistical forethought because he would have no one else to trade with or get assistance from. NPC or player. He was completely on his own.

And Kirito had to do every single step with the use of only one open skill slot. His other two were occupied and he couldn't afford to reset his progress in either of them by temporarily letting them go. So he had no choice but to make do with only one.

So, as an example, he could not have both the Crafting skill and the Leatherworking skill simultaneously, even though he needed to use both of them at some point. He would have to switch between them, resetting his progress in whatever skill he let go of each time. He had to account for this. And it changed the ordering of each of the steps he had to go through significantly enough that Kirito had needed to carve out a flowchart and multiple accompanying diagrams into the dirt to organize his thoughts.

There were pitfalls that he could easily fall into if he wasn't careful that would be irreversible.

On one particular step in this process, he needed his Crafting skill to be at level 3. This required a certain amount of xp. Now, Kirito knew exactly how much he needed to get to level 3 since all skills shared the same experience curve and level milestones and he knew all that information from his experience levelling up in the beta. But here was the problem. Going through all of these intermediary steps would not necessarily give him enough xp to get to that Crafting level on their own.

So he had to carefully choose the ordering of each item that he created to ensure that he ended up reaching level 3 at the exact moment that he needed it, without ever wasting any of his raw materials.

This required additional planning, and more diagrams and calculations. And if he made a mistake anywhere, or if he dropped the Crafting skill early after forgetting he'd need it later on in the process for a final step or something, it would be easy to screw himself over and leave himself with nothing at the end but a bunch of unprocessed, intermediary ingredients that he couldn't do anything with until he again levelled up his Crafting skill.

You lost all progress in a skill after you dropped it. So he'd be back at level 1. And he'd be stuck there until he found another way to level up the skill, wasting a bunch more time.

If this was not problematic enough, there were further complications.

For one, Kirito had never picked up the Crafting skill before. So he was not completely confident that he knew exactly how much xp he would be getting for each step. He was pretty sure that he knew this info, at least he had good ballpark estimates since he had regularly visited the fan-made wiki that had been set up by the beta testers that had included all of the relevant spreadsheets and levelling guides. But if he had to put a number to it he could only say that he was about 90% confident in this memorized information of his. He had only passably glanced at the webpage on the Crafting skill one time about a month ago, and so the information wasn't exactly fresh in his mind. And there was no way to access this website again while he was in this new version of the game.

So there was that to contend with as well.

Then there was the fact that he was having to perform all of these computations by hand, in the dirt, without any sort of calculator to check his work. SAO didn't have calculators as far as he was aware. Perhaps as an unlocked function in a Merchanting skill of some kind, but he could only speculate about that. So he was having to rely on the half-forgotten procedures and algorithms that he had learned back in elementary school to do arithmetic. Long division and multiplication, addition and subtraction. And if he made a single dumb mistake anywhere, he could end up screwing himself over to the point of potentially being killed the next time he fell asleep.

If he didn't have a tent, he'd just have to risk sleeping out in the open. He'd just go inside the thick forest and pray that nobody ever found him. But he didn't want to have to rely on being lucky for survival.

There were more problems.

There were specialized tools that he needed to make. Because he couldn't just perform any of the multitudes of Crafting steps with his bare hands. He'd need a hammer, a chisel, a needle, some rope, threads, plant fibres, he'd need to make a fire pit, gather a bunch of stones together, and some sticks from the environment, and he'd need to make some other Crafting-specific tools that he would only ever use for the creation of these items and nothing else ever again…

The point was that none of this was meant to be done by a single person.

He didn't have any of these tools on hand either, so he would have to make them himself, further complicating his diagrams and calculations.

He would have to break down some of the animal parts he had collected to do that. Boar tusks from his earlier grinding and animal bones could be converted and shaped into bone variants of these tools. Bone tools had low durability and could not be used for very long, but Kirito could make a lot of them. Enough to not have to worry about this all that much.

Of course, he'd have to take into account the amount of xp he'd be getting for each tool he created, and exactly how many times each tool could be used before breaking so that he could know the exact minimum number that he needed to see him through this entire process.

He had limited materials on hand, wouldn't be getting any more, and he was trying to optimize his use of them to the greatest possible extent. Because the better he did, the longer he would last out here.

Then there was the matter of the ropes and pieces of thread that he needed. He had gotten a bit lucky there. A lot of it could be made using plant fibres. An item that could be created by breaking down many of the common Nepenthe drops. The rest could be made using animal hairs, which was a common drop from dire wolves...

He had all of that in his inventory.

But then he needed to tan his own leather. Which involved building a stretching rack and doing a whole lot of waiting next to a fire. This also required the use of the Woodworking skill.

This was a step that he had forgotten about in his original plans and had only remembered once he had started planning this procedure out like this in detail. Tanning leather in this game took a long time. As in, this whole procedure would not be done in 10 or 20 minutes. With the tanning included, Kirito would be stuck doing this mindless work for several hours.

All of this... because he couldn't rent an inn.

* * *

After checking and rechecking his calculations for what had to have been the tenth time, Kirito finally sat down and went through the most tedious procedure he had ever performed so far during his time in Aincrad.

He built all of his tools from scratch using the raw materials in his inventory. He created multiple tents, sleeping bags, a set of tools, a fur blanket, and everything else that he could imagine needing for the foreseeable future.

It took ages. Hours upon hours of skill-swapping, navigating through various menus and submenus, waiting next to a fire, and processing his gathered raw materials through a series of intermediary stages.

But eventually, it was over.

A feeling of pride went through him at the end. Because everything had gone exactly according to his plans. There hadn't been a single hitch, and his math had been perfect. He had ended up using the precise amount of materials that he predicted, and he had ended up receiving the exact amount of xp at each step that he had expected.

It had been flawless. Which was fantastic because he was absolutely and utterly exhausted by the time it was over.

So, he set up his new tent in his cave. Then he set up his notification settings to create his alarm. Then he hotkeyed his teleport crystal and his sword so that he would have instant access to them in the off-chance that he happened to be rudely interrupted while he was asleep. Then he set up his sleeping bag and fur blanket and activated his Hide ability once more so that he could power-level the skill over the next several hours. Then he set up exactly 3 tarps, each of which blocked off the entrance of his cave. A determined PKer would have to rip all 3 of them down before revealing his tent, giving Kirito 4 chances to wake up in the event of an emergency.

It was probably overkill, but he didn't care at the moment. If after the first few days nobody came, he'd probably take one or two down to conserve their durability. But he was feeling particularly vulnerable since it was his first time sleeping, so he wanted to be extra careful.

Then finally, with all of his preparations made, he laid down and went to sleep, vowing to never again do something that infuriatingly tedious ever again.

He had no idea how other players did that sort of thing for a living.

* * *

He woke up at about 10:00 pm. It felt like morning to him.

Nothing had woken him up unexpectedly while he had been sleeping, so that was good news.

Technically, it was still day two of the death game. But not for long. It had started at 1:00 p.m the previous day, so that made it hour 33 by his count.

Today, he wanted to remain awake for another 24 hours to get his sleep schedule back in line. During that time, he wanted to see if he could finally make a sub-10-minute run.

Since it was unlikely that there was another spot on the floor nearby where he could get this much combat xp per hour, he had no reason to leave. He would need to find a dungeon to even get close, and he'd have to get lucky to find one that wasn't being used. Most of the dungeons were public knowledge to the beta testers, as their locations had been posted before the official launch of the game back when everyone was sharing their map data with each other in the final days of the beta test.

Kirito would bet that all the known ones were being raided and cleared out of any valuables by other former beta testers at that very moment. He'd have to get extremely lucky to find an unknown one that wasn't.

And he saw no reason to take a risk like that. If he failed to find anything else, he'd have wasted a bunch of time.

It was better to stay there for the foreseeable future, he decided. Working towards Nepenthe Escape Velocity. At least until he was strong enough to start soloing the floor dungeon. Then he'd consider moving on.

His cave seemed to be a relatively safe place to sleep as well.

He didn't want to push his luck any further in the meantime.

He deactivated Hide, took down everything in his makeshift campsite, and headed out to start grinding once again.

* * *

He was just _barely_ above the 10-minute line.

He had been at it for a few hours, but he seemed to have hit a wall. Four of those runs had been double fruited ones too―where the swarm itself contained another fruited Nepenthe.

He had been just a hair away from level 7 at the end of the previous night before calling it quits to make his equipment, so he had levelled up some time ago, and was now well on his way toward level 8.

But this would likely be the last time that he would level up more than a single time in one day, he was pretty sure. At his current experience rate, he could make it to 8 by the end of the day, but it would take him two more days to get to 9.

It was easy to measure what level he should be based on how many days he spent grinding. Kirito knew the mathematical function that the game used to determine what level a player would be based on how much combat xp they had. It had been public knowledge that anyone could have looked up on the internet back during the beta. So it was just simple math to predict what level he would be in x number of days. He just had to extrapolate from his current experience rate.

He was 3 days away from level 9 at the moment, and 6 days away from level 10.

This was too long for him, though. Even though it was probably the greatest xp per hour that anyone had achieved in the game so far, he needed something even greater to gain the strength that he needed to get a clear lead over everyone else. So he needed to accelerate his experience rate again somehow.

How could he kill more Nepenthes in less time?

His goal was to be 5 levels ahead of the next best player. He figured that the second-highest levelled player was at around level 6 or 7 at the moment.

That assumed that they did the Secret Medicine of the Forest quest, got the sword and xp reward on day one, just like he had, and then spent the entire second-day monster grinding using typical, high-end methods.

There was probably no one else doing anything like what he was, however. Kirito figured that most players would think that what he was doing at the moment was too dangerous and insane to even try. He would have thought that himself if someone had asked him his opinion about this training method even just a few days ago.

But now it wasn't good enough. He needed to go faster. The only question was how.

He spent the rest of the day with that question on his mind. The only notable thing that happened during that time, was a single triple Nepenthe run―a double Nepenthe run, where the second wave had yet another fruited Nepenthe.

He was running out of time before he reached escape velocity. If he couldn't get ahead of the curve by then, he wouldn't be able to use this training method anymore.

There would be too many fruited Nepenthes spawning in, and it would ruin his loop. He was still nowhere near strong enough to fight a horde of Nepenthes of that size on his own in a straight fight. He needed open space to implement his hit-and-run tactics. If he couldn't loop anymore, he couldn't fight like this anymore, and he'd have to leave the area.

He made it to level 8 just before 9:00 pm, almost 23 hours after starting his grind.

Then he went to sleep.

* * *

The answer came to him in a dream. It was crazy, insane, and there was no way it would work.

...Which was why he was going to try it.

All of those things could also be said about his current training method. But he did it anyway because it was just so unbelievably effective despite that.

 _Insane_ was not the same thing as _bad_. That was one of the lessons this death game had taught him so far.

Killing more Nepenthes faster, meant doing more damage in less time. It was a simple concept, and it was what gave him his new idea.

SAO calculated the amount of damage a player did in an attack based on several factors. What level was the player? What weapon was the player holding? What were their stats?

None of these were things that he had much control over at the moment.

He was on floor one still, so the experience rates were generally pretty low everywhere, so he couldn't control how fast he gained strength all that much. He couldn't trade with anyone either, so he couldn't buy better weapons, or upgrade his current ones.

But there was one thing that he might be able to increase still.

Speed.

How fast does the tip of the sword strike the opponent?

If he could increase that speed, he might finally be able to start 2-shotting these larger Nepenthes. The biggest bottleneck he was currently facing was the fact that he had to hit each Nepenthe with 3 sword skills on average to kill them when they were at full health. To get around that, he was having to leave them alive for longer while they were piled together in the swarm to accumulate this extra friendly fire damage to let him one-shot them.

If he could speed up his attack though―not the number of attacks, but the actual velocity of the edge of his sword―he might be able to start two-shotting. He had already increased the number of attacks he could dish out per second as much as he could for the moment.

His One-Handed Sword skill level was not high enough to have access to any 3-hit sword skills yet. Just 2-hit ones. And initially, he had no idea how he could speed up his swing any further without levelling up and putting stat points into AGI.

But he had seen the answer in a dream. The idea was inspired by an anime that he had watched a few years back.

He was already swinging his sword as fast and as hard as he could, so the system wouldn't let him go faster until his AGI stat improved―but that was just his standard forward and backwards velocity.

As far as he was aware, there was no limit to how fast a player could _spin_.

Technically there was a limit if he was trying to just spin in place under his own power―as that was governed by his AGI―but if he could get an outside force to spin him, then there was no limit as far as he was aware. If he could somehow start spinning really fast, and yet still maintain his forward velocity, he may be able to hit harder.

He might be able to hit more often too.

Dizziness wasn't too much of a problem in SAO. So there shouldn't be any physical limit stopping him from doing this along those lines. He would just have to figure out how to actually pull it off. But he was pretty sure he had an answer there too. A crazy one.

Two swords. He needed to use two swords at once.

The game didn't support dual wielding as far as he was aware, but there were a few little tricks in the system that he could take advantage of.

The first one was the fact that sword skills worked no matter if a player was left-handed, or right-handed. And all the sword skills were symmetrical between the two types.

He also knew that he could do a one-handed sword skill even if he had an item equipped in the other hand. This was how shields worked, after all.

This meant that if he was holding two swords at the same time, he could do one-handed sword skills with either of them individually, but with only one at a time. So, even if he couldn't attack with both of them at once, he could attack with either separately.

He might also be able to sneak in an extra non-sword-skill attack here and there with his off-hand, but that would take some testing and wasn't all that important to him at the moment. It'd be much weaker than an attack with a sword skill, but it would do at least some damage.

But the concept that he really wanted to experiment with was sword-skill powered spinning.

The process made sense on paper. It worked like skill jumping. Fire off a Sonic Leap, or some other suitable sword skill directly at the ground. When it goes off, jump upwards, and off the ground _hard_.

Rather than crashing into the ground then, he would be spinning in the air. The sword skill would end, and the cooldown would expire while he was still airborne. Then, while he was spinning in the air, he would activate a sword skill from his _other_ sword.

It would activate, and his attack would have all the power of his sword skill behind it, plus the extra energy from the spin. And the system would calculate a higher damage output from the attack as a result.

He would use a second sword not as a way to attack but as a way to move faster.

This type of combat might be perfect for him. He was ambidextrous after all. He had learned that long ago when he used to practice kendo.

All that remained was to see if it would work.

* * *

Failure.

He had tried a handful of times in isolation, failing spectacularly―and probably hilariously―each time. After over an hour of misery, he was forced to shelve the idea. It was a gigantic waste of time, so Kirito gave up and decided to continue his Nepenthe runs.

He really couldn't afford to fall behind on his levelling by chasing dragons. For the entire day since then, he had been going through the usual routine, pouting the entire time.

Go out to the Nepenthe forest. Engage a handful of Nepenthes one-on-one―while trying to sneak in his highly experimental spin maneuver now and then, failing every time―pop the fruited Nepenthe's fruit once it showed up, then do a run.

Then repeat.

He only took breaks to have lunch and a snack.

It was frustrating getting the timing down on the spin. The margins were so narrow that they may not even be there at all.

Sonic leap didn't seem to cooperate with him when he tried to shoot it at his own feet either.

He needed to come up with something else.

* * *

It was the 5th day of the death game. Kirito still had enough food stocked up for another week or so from his previous monster grinding, but eventually, he would need to stock up again. Nepenthes did not drop anything edible after all, and those were the only monsters he had been fighting.

Today was also the final day that he could run his loop.

He had reached escape velocity shortly after reaching level 9 he was pretty sure, after getting an octuple Nepenthe run. And he had lucked out in finally getting them to stop spawning after just 8 fruit explosions because he had been mentally drained afterwards.

He wasn't fast enough or strong enough to continue yet.

Eight fruits had exploded on that run before he had gotten the chance to take a break, and if he tried the loop again, that would probably be it. His special Nepenthe spawn rate was just too high now. At some point, he'd be too tired to continue the loop, and he'd have to somehow retreat during the middle of it, which was dangerous. So dangerous that he might have to use that teleport crystal to succeed.

The whole strategy involved him standing on a metaphorical knife edge. If he tried to run that loop in any other way other than the way he had been running it, he'd screw it up and be overwhelmed by their numbers. He could only do it at all because of the vast open space in the clearing. If he tried to retreat to a place where there wasn't as much space, there was a good chance he'd get surrounded.

So he needed a way now more than ever to kill the Nepenthes faster than they arrived in the clearing so that he could leave the loop whenever he chose to after simply clearing them all out before the next wave arrived. The spin idea should do it if he could just get it to work.

It hadn't worked out the way he thought it would yet, but he was still determined to figure it out somehow. The idea sounded okay in theory, it just wasn't working out for him for some reason.

As much as he hated to admit it, he would have to stop grinding Nepenthes for a while until he figured something out. He could fight them normally, but it was almost a waste of time to do so. With all of his efficiency improvements on his runs, fighting Nepenthes normally gave out only about one fifth the xp per hour now.

Which wasn't worth his time.

As much of a waste of time as it might turn out to be, he wanted to spend a day just trying to work on his spins.

He had to know if it was possible.

He'd decide at the end of the day if he would continue with them or not.

* * *

It worked.

It actually worked.

Kirito was stunned by what he just did.

He had been thinking about it the wrong way the whole time.

His problem had been the fact that he had been trying to initiate the spin with a sword skill. But that didn't work. So he had tried out something different, instead.

Using his own body to generate the starting momentum.

The avatar he was controlling was significantly stronger and faster than his real body, so he could do things with it that he could never hope to pull off in real life.

He had seen videos on the internet before all of this started, of people doing crazy flips and tricks with their own bodies. Flips, cartwheels, crazy gymnastics, and a whole host of other combinations.

What if instead of starting the spin with a sword skill, he built up the starting momentum with his body, just like the people did in those videos? That was the question that had started this line of experimentation.

The main problem he was having was that Sonic Leap couldn't be launched at the ground the way he needed it to. He needed to be facing _away_ from his opponent to get it to work, yet still moving towards them to pull off the spin.

So, he needed to lead into it with something. A kick, or a cartwheel, or something else of that nature to generate the proper rotational momentum.

Just like he had done back near Horunka. Back when he had faced that wall of Little Nepenthes after pulling that sword out of his back in that forest, he had needed a lot of extra rotational momentum to get the skill jump to work properly and to get him up the trunk of that tree.

Ideally, he'd generate the momentum without his hands ever needing to touch the ground, too. He was carrying two swords and he'd rather not have to put them in his inventory or summon them while he was spinning.

So he had decided that he needed to practice flipping. And after some deliberation, he decided to use up his still empty third skill slot with the Acrobatics skill.

It had been a test at first, just to see if it would help. If it hadn't, then he would have tossed it immediately afterward.

But it had been the _exact_ thing that he had been missing. It allowed him to spin way faster, gave him an incredible boost in flexibility, and just allowed his body to respond quicker to his commands.

How the skill wasn't considered a staple amongst all beta testers, he had no idea. But after allocating it, his body did exactly what he wanted it to.

It took a little bit of time to get used to his newly increased agility and flexibility, but when he had, doing basic Acrobatics was no problem at all.

He could flip, cartwheel, do crazy twists in the air, and any other sort of maneuver that he could imagine. If he could visualize it, he could master it in under 5 minutes. As long as it was within reason anyway. And after coming up with a lead-up for the spin, a no-handed cartwheel with a bit of spin added in to make sure he was facing away from his target, he would land, kick up with his leg, spin, and then activate Sonic Leap.

The technique would send him barreling towards his opponent, and at the last moment, he would direct the momentum of the skill downwards with a flick of his wrist, putting him into an uncontrollable spin while preserving his forward velocity.

All he had to practice was getting out of that death spiral now, which was way harder than it looked.

During his practice, he had smashed himself into trees, rocks, all kinds of bushes and shrubbery, and even into a few Nepenthes with that spin. He just couldn't land it properly, and he was always off-balance.

On a typical spin, he would often count himself seeing the ground as many as 10 or 11 times, before he finally crashed.

Eleven full rotations.

 _That_ was how fast he was spinning.

This made it very difficult to precisely time out when to activate his second sword skill to strike his target with.

He had tested it out on a single Nepenthe a bunch of times. He had found one on its own because he didn't want to pop any other fruits any time soon.

He had finally succeeded for the first time on his last test, even managing to land on his feet after. And he didn't just two-shot it like he had expected to.

It had gone down with that single hit.

The combination of techniques had worked out way better than he had anticipated. All that remained now was to practice. Because this was a technique that you couldn't just do. You had to put in hours of work with it to get anything resembling any sort of consistency.

He needed to execute his spins faster. He needed to find the right balance while he was in the air, and time the landing properly. He needed to incorporate his spins into his fighting style in a natural way, too.

He needed to just... stop crashing into things with it.

And finally, he needed to time that second, off-hand sword skill so he could consistently execute it during the spin.

He was pretty much going to have to rework his entire fighting style from the ground up to get this to work the way he wanted. He expected this to take hundreds of hours of intense practice, as he was going to need to work this into his muscle memory and his instincts, overwriting the old, outdated techniques that were currently there.

He didn't have to do it all at once, though. He could take it one step at a time.

* * *

He spent the rest of the day practicing.

He missed out on some combat xp, and initially, that had frustrated him a great deal. But after reflecting on what his true goals were, to survive, he realized that what he was doing now was a lot more productive than mindless grinding was.

A player's combat level wasn't everything in a fight. And if he ever intended to be able to fight off potentially all of Aincrad at once, he needed to be able to avoid attacks, not just tank more hits.

And he needed to be able to spin. He had visualized how a party of players would try to kill someone like him a lot recently because it was likely that that would happen sometime in the future.

They would try to flank him and attack him from multiple directions. If he could perfect his spin though, Kirito could easily deal with that. So taking the time to learn was important.

He could afford to lose some xp if, during that time, he was still improving himself.

He'd start fighting the Nepenthes again when he was ready, he decided. Until then, he worked on getting used to two swords and getting used to using them in conjunction with his Acrobatics skill. And he worked on his spins.

All while he tried to figure out how his two swords interacted with each other when executing separate sword skills.

* * *

**AN: Have a Nice Day!**


	6. Progress

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

It took him three days before he was comfortable enough with his new style to start grinding again.

In terms of levels, he expected that the second-highest player in the game was nearly even with him now, because of his temporary break from grinding. But hopefully, that would all change today.

He was ready to go again.

He had learned so much about the mechanics of the game during his training.

He had found out that there were tiny windows of time, for instance, where one of his sword skills could be interrupted by initiating a skill from his other sword.

He had discovered it accidentally, but it was something that he intended to make use of in the future.

The timing was so hard to get right, but it was possible. And when he succeeded in getting the timing right, on those rare occasions that he did, the first skill would often skip its cooldown entirely.

The result was, essentially, a dual-wielding sword skill.

He needed a lot more practice to get that particular concept down, however, because he was nowhere close to being good at it yet. He'd only succeed maybe one in a hundred attempts.

He was going to need to spend a lot of time in the future practicing it. But he was certain that this type of training would be worthwhile in the end. He already had a couple of ideas for how he could use those types of techniques when he finally had them mastered.

It'd be just like his spins. It would completely change the way he fought. But that was all for future Kirito to figure out. For now, he needed to start training again.

He was pretty sure that he had his spin attacks ready enough for combat, and he was ready to test them out for real.

So there he stood, in the clearing in front of his cave once more, observing as the wave of Nepenthe cursors rushed towards him from the forest.

They had reverted from red to pink long ago, indicating that he was now a higher level than these monsters.

He readied his swords and settled into his stance. It was time to see what he could do.

* * *

Eight minutes.

He had shaved off almost three minutes from his old record on his first attempt.

He was able to determine this after killing his fifty-second Nepenthe and glancing at his in-game clock.

Fifty-two Nepenthes was what he referred to as a ' _standard loop.'_ That was the number that would arrive upon bursting a single exploding fruit from the forest. And a standard loop of Nepenthes had been the amount of Nepenthes he had been trying to kill in under 10 minutes all this time. Which meant that he had succeeded, surpassing his own expectations in the process.

The clearing was far from empty now, however. He was at Nepenthe escape velocity after all. Which meant that every swarm had at least one fruited Nepenthe inside it.

And it would _always_ burst from a stray vine or acid attack from a different Nepenthe, even if he didn't try to burst it himself. A process that generated the endless wave of walking plants that was now swarming him.

Thankfully, due to the thickness of the trees on the higher ground above his cave, no Nepenthes spawned from up there. Which meant that he was never attacked from behind. They all arrived from the forest in front of him.

And that meant that he could manage the waves a lot easier.

Whenever he found himself in a tight spot, he'd initiate a spin which, due to his recent practice, could one-shot multiple targets at once. And whenever he did use a spin on a line of targets like that, he was even able to steer himself to some degree during the middle of it. His sword would be impaled into his targets for just long enough before they shattered that he could push or pull on his weapons to redirect his momentum enough to target the next Nepenthe in the line, which allowed him to control the direction of the spin dynamically.

Whenever another fruit would burst he'd let the new swarm arrive while he was still fighting the old one, then he would rip through one of the flanks as the new swarm tried to surround him, with a couple of back to backspins. Then the new swarm would merge with the old one, and the process would begin again. He'd start looping and looping, kiting the swarm along as he slowly whittled it down.

And just like before, he was constantly finding these tiny efficiency improvements everywhere.

He could almost determine to the second, how long it would take between a fruit popping, and another swarm arriving.

So he barely even needed to pay attention to the oncoming Nepenthes anymore.

He'd simply glance up when he expected the next wave to show up, rip through the appropriate flank with a spin, and then he'd continue.

He had also discovered that there were small windows of time for him to use his spin while fighting the swarm itself.

There were small opportunities that allowed him to temporarily disengage, do a quick flip, and execute a spin across the entire front line of Nepenthes before they could counterattack. And this particular improvement was what was causing him to get such a high rate of xp per hour.

He was almost at double what he had been making before, now, which put this training method on par with dungeons on the second floor. But then again, those rates were outdated. There may be ways to further improve them with some of the same tactics he was using now. He was comparing this training method to the estimated rates of a typical player in a party of six. Which might not be all that useful, or accurate.

He could safely say now that he was no longer a typical player. People in the beta hadn't tried to do anything like this, as far as he knew. And it just worked so well, now that he had taken the time to figure it all out.

He was so happy that he had put in the effort to learn how to do this. But he could still do better. He wanted to push the limits even further.

What was the maximum rate of xp per hour that he could squeeze out, here? Would there eventually be a point where every Nepenthe was a fruited one? Their spawn rate was still increasing, after all.

He had no idea. He would find out though.

He wasn't going to leave this spot until he had to. Not with the xp, he was currently getting.

* * *

He had been wrong earlier when he had thought that he'd never level up twice in one day again.

He blew right past 10 and made it to 11 that day. Granted, he had nearly been at level 10 when he started grinding again after his break, so it hardly counted as two levels, but it was still nice to see.

He continued grinding.

* * *

Two days later, he had made it to level twelve.

With that level up, he had unlocked a fourth skill slot. A slot that he intended to leave empty for a while. He had originally wanted the Searching skill, but he quickly decided that he wouldn't pick it yet, as it may be the case that another event would come up just like the one that had made him decide to take up the acrobatics skill.

He might just need to take up another specific skill in the future to further increase the strength of his character, and while Searching was useful, he didn't need it in this forest.

He didn't need it at all, yet.

Later, he decided. Not now.

* * *

The days continued to pass by as he shredded through the Nepenthes.

Every day was the same.

Wake up. Grind. Eat. Grind. Sleep. Repeat.

He needed to make up for lost time.

* * *

His Anneal Blade had served a single purpose.

To bridge the gap between him being too weak to be able to one-shot a Nepenthe with a basic sword, and being strong enough to do exactly that.

It served its purpose well, and then it finally broke.

But he was now level 15.

Coincidentally, it was also the 15th day of the death game.

But, now that he was level 15, he was capable of one-shotting the Nepenthes in the forests with a spin attack, using nothing but a pair of basic swords.

He had burned through a ton of them already like that, but he had a stockpile in reserve.

Basic swords were a pretty common uncommon drop to get. And with the sheer quantity of Nepenthes he had killed over the last two weeks, he had a lot of them stacked up in reserve.

He no longer had a decent weapon anymore, but he had gotten strong enough to not need a good one anymore, against these monsters.

He had already been one-shotting the Nepenthes with his Anneal Blade earlier, and he could one-shot them again now, just as easily without it. He wasn't missing out on any xp despite its loss. He was getting kills just as fast as he had before with a pair of basic swords.

He had something like forty of them in his inventory too, now. Plus the two he was holding.

Each pair would last about eight hours of grinding at this intensity before they would break, which meant that he had something like 20 days of weapons left. Ignoring any other potential weapons he may pick up during that time.

It was interesting to see how he had to adapt his fighting style with each pair of new weapons, too.

Not all basic swords were the same. A basic sword wasn't even an item in the game, technically speaking. That had just been a term colloquially used by the beta testers to refer to the collection of all swords in the game that had roughly the same stats as the ones you could buy in the Town of Beginnings.

Each one still had their own stats, their own name, their own price, colour, you name it. They were all technically unique, despite being lumped together under the label 'basic sword'. But they were all also pretty much useless to even a mid-levelled player unless they were willing to put in a vast amount of resources to upgrade it repeatedly and to the maximum.

Which was only rarely a good idea. A case could be made for doing that, instead of buying a better sword, but it depended on the player. Everyone had different playstyles and had different opinions on what the best practices were.

Kirito abruptly backflipped, activated Sonic Leap, and launched it while twisting towards another target.

The skill fired, and at the last moment, he directed it downwards, putting himself into what he referred to as a death spin. If it wasn't executed correctly, or if he lost track of his orientation, he'd miss his target and probably die, hence the name. And if he succeeded with it, all of his targets would die rapidly in single hits. Lots of death happened either way, so he thought the name was fitting.

He would typically do about eight rotations with one before he struck his first target, and one more rotation for each additional target in the line before landing on his feet again, but those numbers varied a lot depending on the situation.

He had this move pretty much mastered at the moment. Both versions of it. He had had to learn how to spin from both directions after all, so there were two versions of the spin. In the first one, he initiated the spin with his left sword, and in the off-hand version, he initiated it with his right.

It was the same difference as comparing doing a cartwheel where your left hand touches the ground first, with doing one with your right touching the ground first. The leading arm would control which direction you faced, and what your orientation was.

It was the same thing for his spins. He couldn't always depend on his normal variant, as sometimes he wouldn't have enough time or space to shift himself into the proper position for it when he was in the middle of combat.

Sometimes, the instant he landed, he would have to immediately spin again but would not be in the proper starting position for the normal variant, or his targets would not be where he wanted them to be for a normal spin to be the right move to take them out. In those cases, he'd have to spin in a different direction, and that was where the off-hand variant would come in.

He was ambidextrous, but he had still initially learned how to spin while leading with his left sword, so that was the version he felt more comfortable with, and the one he used most often.

If he had to guess, he'd say that he probably only used the off-hand variant about 30% of the time he needed to spin. And he might have used it even less often than that.

But it was often enough to be important. He had already run into a couple of situations where he had needed to choose to either use the off-hand variant spin or have to use his teleport crystal to escape the area.

There had been a couple of close calls during his training, mostly due to brief bouts of his own stupidity while he was running the loop, but he had managed to make his way through them, for the most part, due to that ability.

The off-hand variant had saved his life a few times, essentially.

There had also been a few other modifications he had been able to make to those spins over the past couple of days. They became so much more effective once he started throwing in multi-hit sword skills to them, for instance.

He almost always used Sonic Leap to put himself into the spin and to generate the momentum he needed, and he attacked his targets with his other sword for the most part. Sometimes he'd get an additional swing in with his first sword, but it was usually on cooldown still after initiating the spin in the first place, so he typically couldn't use another skill with it. But he was able to take advantage of the fact that sword skills were _relative_ to the player initiating them, to create some interesting modifications.

Sword skills were relative. If he were standing on a rotating disk, for instance, one that spun at one revolution every second, he could still activate sword skills despite his field of view constantly changing and having no target.

If he fired off a sword skill that did nothing more than thrust forward twice, once every half second while he was standing on that hypothetical disk, for example, to an observer not on the spinning disk, the two strikes would be in opposite directions because the disk had rotated him 180 degrees in the middle of the skill.

The strikes would be in opposite directions even though to Kirito's perspective, he'd be thrusting twice, exactly in front of him each time.

Which meant that sword skills like those, ones that were typically meant to be used on a stationary target in front of the user, suddenly had a new variety of uses while he was in the rotating reference frame of his death spin, and he had started experimenting with these types of skills a few days ago.

Vertical Arc, for example, was a two-hit sword skill that typically targeted whatever was exactly in front of him. But while he was spinning, it could be used to take out two different targets, one on either side of him.

In the tiny delay between the two strikes of that skill, his reference frame will have rotated just enough for a new target to be in his sights. So after the second strike of the skill executed, two enemies would have been defeated by that single skill instead of just one, which created a whole new set of ways to use sword skills, and a whole new set of problems to solve.

A skill meant for thrusting to deal piercing damage when standing firmly on the ground would translate into a slashing skill while he was spinning, and had to be used differently as a result.

Certain slashing skills were outright useless while he was spinning, as sometimes, he'd be slashing in one direction while rotating in the other, which meant that his sword would be stationary in the air as their angular velocities cancelled, or the strike would at the very least be much weaker than if he had executed it while standing on his feet.

But on the contrary, if he slashed in the same direction of his spin, the speed of his slash would effectively double.

So there were these seemingly arbitrary limitations that he now had to account for.

Certain slashing skills would work very well while he was spinning in his off-hand variant, but wouldn't work at all while he was spinning normally, precisely due to this reason.

A slashing skill that had its velocity cancelled when spinning in one direction, would have its velocity increased when spinning in the other, and that would determine what skills he used to attack with during his spin.

Three-hit skills while spinning were even trickier to deal with.

While still in the air from his spin, Kirito's second sword activated the skill Sharp Nail. It was the only three-hit sword skill he was capable of using at his level.

Due to his spin, each of the three hits struck and shattered a different Nepenthe.

If he had used that skill on solid ground, it wouldn't have been possible to hit more than one target with it. The spin just changed everything.

Due to the nature of the Sharp Nail skill, and the directions and angles that the system would force his hands in while the skill was being used, it was perfect for being the first skill he attacked with mid-spin. Despite it being a three-hit skill, it worked in perfect sync with his spin. They just meshed perfectly together.

Kayaba probably hadn't designed it to be used that way at all, but it worked perfectly when Kirito did use it like that. Likely, totally coincidentally.

Before landing, his first sword was finally off cooldown, so he managed to get another Vertical off with it, destroying a fourth Nepenthe.

If there had been a fifth target, he would have instead used a Vertical Arc as the final skill with it to be able to kill all five targets in one spin.

Five targets was his current record for _'number of kills during one spin'_.

He landed on his feet and continued fighting.

A lot had happened in the past few days. He had reached another milestone that he hadn't anticipated ever reaching. The Nepenthes were no longer piling up. He no longer had to pool them together and run loops to fight them effectively. He had trained extensively enough, and killed so many Nepenthes recently, that the forest was essentially his.

He could kill a wave of Nepenthes faster than they could gather. Which meant he had to travel into the forest to hunt them down as they were spawning. But today was probably the last time he would do so for a while. He had been rationing his food out for as long as he could, but tomorrow he was going to have to stock up again.

He had roughly one day of food left on him now, and he needed to hunt some more.

And he would do so tomorrow. He was just finishing up his last training session now.

The Nepenthes couldn't touch him anymore. He didn't have to run anymore either. He could walk into the forest, burst a fruit, and mow them all down as they arrived.

It was almost like a dance, as weird as that sounded. He'd weave his way through the crowd of Nepenthes, and he'd spin whenever he needed to take out a line of them.

He had been fighting Nepenthes for so long that he no longer even had to pay attention to them. It all happened automatically, and it felt as if his body just went off on its own.

But he was reaching a plateau. He had grinded and grinded for almost 16 hours a day for two weeks in the area, and it was no longer useful to do so. It was inefficient now.

He could continue for a while if he really wanted to, but he was something like five days away from his next level at the rate he was going. And there was no more room for further optimizing that rate of xp. He had essentially maxed it out.

If he simply waited for the next floor to open up, his training time would be better put to use on the better hunting grounds that would open up then.

Instead, he decided that he should be using this time in the early game to better round out his character. He needed to choose a fourth skill and power level his Hiding ability again.

Since he had nobody to talk to these past two weeks, he hadn't done very much aside from grinding and thinking. And he had thought a lot about what he truly needed to survive in this game.

Time was a resource, and he needed to spend it like one.

Sure he could allocate a few hours to grinding on these Nepenthes now, but if he instead allocated those hours to grinding in better spots _later_ , his time would have been used more efficiently.

Since he was so high levelled now, training on these monsters was turning into a waste of time, and he had other things that he still needed to do.

Like his Hiding skill, for example.

If he could keep it on constantly for days at a time, he might be able to max it out entirely, due to the way that it was levelled.

At the end of the first day of doing nothing but keeping the Hide modifier of the Hiding skill active, he would be getting a very high rate of Hiding experience. But if he kept it on even after that point, at the end of the second day, he would be getting a ridiculous rate of experience per hour.

If he kept up that process, he might even have a shot of maxing out the skill entirely in just a few days, something that no beta had ever done throughout the entire beta test.

It was another seemingly insane idea.

Because very few players would decide, in his situation, that it would be a good idea to just stop hunting monsters entirely for potentially days at a time so that they could power level a skill that would have just gradually levelled up naturally over a couple of months without having to pay any direct attention to it.

But he wasn't a typical player anymore. He was orange. And since everyone, NPC or otherwise, was against him now, he needed to prepare for battles against other players just as much as he needed to prepare against floor bosses.

He needed to learn how to disappear.

And due to that power levelling method he had learned about accidentally, earlier, he had a way to do that quickly.

He would stay inside his cave with Hide activated.

He would make sure that no monsters could see him in that time so that the skill wouldn't ever cancel, and he'd make sure that the surrounding light was not intense enough to break his camouflage.

He wouldn't be able to fight or do much else other than interact with his menu during that time, but it would be worth it in the end, he figured, despite how mind-numbingly boring it would be.

He didn't know what level he unlocked it at, because he had never gotten that far in the beta, but he knew that it was possible to hide a cursor with that skill, without having to activate the Hide modifier, allowing him to essentially fight without his cursor ever appearing.

Orange players in the beta had taken advantage of that particular ability all the time, and he would likely need to as well.

He may even be able to walk around in crowds with that. He'd be the only player without a cursor, but when there was a swarm of green cursors in the area, it would take a very observant player to notice something like that.

And walking around without any cursor at all was much better than walking around with an orange one. Orange was just such a contrast that everyone would notice the colour when he was in a crowd. A missing cursor was much more subtle.

He would be able to hide his cursor from anyone that didn't have a high levelled Searching skill with that ability. He would also get a whole host of other benefits from having a Hiding skill that was that highly levelled. Most of which he didn't even know about yet. He didn't know what the higher levelled unlocks in Hiding were, but they could turn out to be very useful to someone like him.

But in the meantime, he was going to finish up this last grinding session and then go to sleep. Then he'd work on his food problem. Then, when he had enough for another few weeks, he'd work on his Hiding skill.

Maybe somewhere along the way, he'd choose his fourth skill too. He still had an empty skill slot to allocate.

* * *

The next morning, he decided to venture further into the forest.

He hadn't explored this area all that much, preferring to just fight the Nepenthes near his cave. But now that he was immune to them, he decided to see what else was out here and continued towards the western edge of the floor.

He had his cave marked on his map, so he wouldn't get lost.

He was keeping an eye out for anything unusual and for any potential food sources. He'd much rather find something way out here in the middle of nowhere than have to go back towards the center of the floor to fight some wolves or boars.

It would be very difficult navigating around all of the other players there without being noticed if he had to do that, and it was quite likely that all of the Dire Wolf spawns had multiple parties of players competing for them.

But he would go there if he had to. He really didn't want to, though.

Ideally, he was looking for some Rabbit spawns. They spawned quite commonly in forests, and he had even seen a few rabbits here and there over the past few days.

But they typically didn't spawn very often near other monsters. Which meant that they were likely in a secluded area.

Each Rabbit essentially equated to one day worth of food if he wanted to be frugal, so if he could even find a dozen or so, he would be good for a while.

Without the Cooking skill, most of them would burn if he tried cooking them, but if he allocated his fourth, still-empty skill slot to cooking temporarily, a simple rabbit would burn only about 10 percent of the time at level 1.

That was his current plan. Hopefully, it wouldn't take too long.

* * *

Luck had been on his side that day.

He had spotted a Rabbit only a few minutes into his search, activated his Hide ability, and followed it right back to a clearing where he could see a few others.

He had found a spawn point for them. It had only taken him about an hour after that point to collect all the food he would need for the next few weeks.

First floor rabbits were slow enough that he could catch them on foot without too much effort. He had picked up forty-one of them during that time, which was a lot of rabbits actually, now that he thought about it. But it wasn't like he was going to complain. MMOs didn't typically have realistic animal spawn rates anyway.

He had decided to gather more than he needed to prevent himself from having to go looking for food again any time soon.

Food items didn't spoil while in a player's inventory, so he could stock up for months at a time if he wanted. And he _did_ want to. Because as far as he knew, a player could find his cave tomorrow and force him to leave. So he wanted to have an emergency supply in his inventory.

He had cooked all the rabbits right there in the clearing over a fire and burned seven of them, which gave him 34 cooked Rabbits in the end.

* * *

Kirito filled up his waterskin at a stream.

Water had been something he hadn't anticipated being a problem initially. But the NerveGear did cause players to feel thirsty, just as it caused them to feel hungry.

After he had crafted those waterproof containers out of the Boar Stomachs, he'd allocated one of them to serve as a makeshift water bottle.

Thankfully, rivers, ponds, and lakes were quite common on this floor, and he didn't have to worry about diseases or anything like that, because players couldn't get sick from drinking water from a natural source.

Germs and bacteria weren't a thing in this world, so sickness could only be inflicted as a status effect from certain poisons and monsters.

This particular stream wasn't too far from his cave, and thankfully, on the map that all players had been given of the floor, natural obstacles like mountains, forests, and bodies of water were already mapped out. Not in very much detail, but the outline was there. Finding water was about as hard as navigating yourself to the nearest blue patch on your floor map.

* * *

How long had _this_ guy been here?

After finishing off all of the things he had needed to do for the day, Kirito had decided to walk the last few kilometres to the edge of the floor, just to see if there was anything out there.

But he had run into someone. He had thought that it had been a player at first and had immediately hidden. But upon closer inspection, he noticed that it was an NPC. One with an exclamation mark over his head.

A quest NPC.

Beta testers had never gone this far out into the woods because it was so far away from the closest village and there was supposed to be nothing over here, so he was quite possibly the first player to ever know about this quest.

Curious, Kirito decided to try it out. This led to a pretty bizarre conversation. To summarize, the NPC had been tasked to deal with the surge of Nepenthes in this forest, but had been totally unprepared for the sheer number in the area and had needed Kirito's help.

Kirito didn't really care all that much about the backstory of the quest, so didn't pay it much attention. He just wanted to know what the guy needed him to do, and what he was getting for it. The guy had promised to _'reward him handsomely,'_ whatever that meant, if he helped him out, so Kirito had decided to play along.

Kirito was tasked to kill 100 Nepenthes in the area and had been given a piece of paper to track his progress. There was a number on the paper that would decrease automatically as he killed nepenthes. So the number represented how many more he needed to kill.

As soon as it left the NPC's hands, however, and Kirito had received it, the amount that he had left to kill, immediately changed from 100 to 0. Because Kirito had killed thousands of them already, and thankfully, this quest seemed to keep track of the ones he had already killed.

So Kirito immediately handed the completed paper back to the man, expecting the quest to be over. It had only been a hundred Nepenthes, so the quest reward likely wouldn't be all that much. That's what he had thought at the time, anyway. But that hadn't been the end.

The man received the paper gratefully, thanked him for his hard work, but then exclaimed that another batch of Nepenthes had shown up unexpectedly. So he handed Kirito another note, telling him he needed to kill 500 more.

Once again, however, the counter reset to zero when Kirito received the note, so he immediately handed it back. But Kirito was starting to see the pattern.

The man, again, complained that another even larger army of them had shown up, and now he had to kill 1,000 of them.

This process was repeated again and the number reset immediately, as Kirito had probably killed that many on his first day of running his loops. The man thanked him again, and then suddenly, the ground behind him started to shake.

Kirito got a bad feeling. When he had been tasked to kill 1,000 Nepenthes, he had gotten a little worried. It told him that this quest was likely not intended to be completed by a single player, and especially not so early on in the game. It was a quest that only a party of five or six players would be tasked to do. Kirito had only managed it by himself because he had shamelessly exploited a game mechanic to do so. This quest wasn't even supposed to be found until later in the game, in all likelihood.

When he took a moment to consider just how far this NPC was from the center of the floor, and just how hard it was to get there, that was the only conclusion he could reach. It wasn't impossible that this quest was meant for players that were level 40 or beyond. A thousand Nepenthes took a long time to kill when fighting them how he used to. With just a single sword, hacking away at one at a time, with both feet firmly on the ground. It would take days like that.

But if this quest was meant for a party, and if it was combat-oriented, it would likely have some sort of mini-boss at the end of it. A lot of quests like that did.

' _I might even have to retreat here,'_ he realized.

The ground continued to shake, and then a giant Nepenthe sprouted out of the ground and _roared_.

The imagery of a giant, roaring plant actually made him crack a grin, despite the situation. The noise was loud, but not debilitating. He had heard louder roars from floor bosses before.

Kirito leaped backwards, facing the beast, and immediately started to analyze it. It was literally just a scaled-up Nepenthe. Probably 10 times bigger. So it had vines on it, and would likely have an acid attack of some sort. Also, since it was a boss monster, it would likely have at least one special attack.

Due to its size, the special attack could possibly be some sort of earthquake generator or perhaps a much more potent and dangerous acid attack. He would have to be on the lookout for those possibilities. The cursor was also a bit concerning. It was a crimson colour, indicating that this monster had a level much higher than his own.

But most minibosses would be like that. And it was often the case that a boss's level was considerably higher than it had any right to be. So Kirito was not ready to retreat just yet. He'd test out its strength first.

The first few attacks sent his way were vine whips. They were large, sweeping motions that were very easy to predict, and very easy to dodge.

Easier in fact, than the vine attacks of the smaller Nepenthes he had been fighting all this time.

He patiently dodged each swipe, and carefully observed the attack patterns. He wanted this boss to cycle through each of its attacks, and any special attacks before engaging with it directly. He did not want to be caught off guard by some crazy, surprise attack at close range.

Kirito purposely remained still so that the boss would target him with its vines, then he'd dodge when the vine was on its way.

It couldn't change directions midway through the attack, he had noticed. So constantly moving around wasn't the best strategy. It was much better to stand still, and dodge at the last moment.

About 15 seconds or so after the fight began, the boss leaned its head back, and started going through the acid attack animation that its smaller counterparts did all the time.

Kirito watched it carefully and dodged only a moment before the attack went off.

A normal Nepenthe's acid attack was comparable to spit. A small amount would come out in a short burst.

This boss's acid attack was more like a fire hose.

It started, and it kept going.

The boss was also capable of following him around with the stream.

Kirito had dodged the first blast but then had to immediately start moving again, as the boss tilted its head to follow him around with the attack.

He had to keep moving for about 10 seconds before the attack finished, and opted to just run in a wide circle around the boss.

Just like the other Nepenthes, it would always aim directly at him, ignoring his forward motion. So as long as he kept moving, the blast would never hit him.

When the blast stopped, Kirito was facing the back of the boss, and he carefully began observing its roots. It hadn't moved since the start of the fight, and he was trying to find out if this boss was a stationary one or not.

Its roots immediately sprung out of the ground, and the boss turned to face him.

Then it started walking.

So the boss could move. That made things a little trickier.

Then it started reaching into its mouth, which initially confused him.

But it clicked when he saw the familiar sight of an exploding fruit. Only, it was a _lot_ bigger.

So, this boss would likely summon minions to aid it, he figured.

The boss popped its own fruit, and Kirito immediately noticed that another swarm of Nepenthes was on the way.

Due to the size of the fruit, he also expected the swarm to be larger than normal, and it may in fact contain other special versions of Nepenthes that only spawn in for this specific boss fight.

Ones with potentially weird abilities he hadn't seen before.

Also, since Kirito was at Nepenthe escape velocity, he would probably have to deal with a continuous swarm of them for the rest of the boss fight.

He still saw nothing truly dangerous yet, though. The swarm would be more of a nuisance than anything.

He continued to observe carefully as the boss approached him.

Kirito deliberately stayed where he was, to see if the boss would try to trample him.

It stopped before trying to crush him and started using its vines instead.

So this boss, despite its ability to move, did not seem to like close-range combat very much. Preferring to stay a distance away to just use its vines.

He was at no risk of being trampled, he realized.

Kirito quickly decided to wait for the swarm of Nepenthes to arrive before beginning his assault. He didn't want to get surrounded while he was attacking the boss at close range, so he figured that it was best to wait for now.

He needed to see if there was anything in the incoming swarm that he needed to worry about first.

It only took another few seconds for the swarm to make it to the clearing.

The quest NPC had run off long ago, Kirito noted, after taking a quick glance around the clearing.

It was a little irritating, in his opinion, when he had to do quests like this. Ones that involved _'helping someone defeat a group of monsters,'_ just for Kirito to have to do all the work and for the NPCs to run off somewhere.

Was it so hard to just say _'I want_ you _to defeat these monsters,'_ instead of implying that you would actually help out?

When the Nepenthes finally arrived, Kirito began attacking them immediately, leaving the boss alone for the moment.

He had already reached the point at which he no longer needed to pool a swarm together to fight it, so he was able to keep up with the spawn rate easily enough.

As soon as they were close enough, Kirito flipped, and Sonic Leaped into a death spin.

Five died in about two seconds from that alone.

Landing, Kirito carried his momentum forward into _another_ spin, ending another three there.

He had learned how to chain multiple spins in a row a while ago in a process he referred to as 'spin chaining,' which was unbelievably effective when fighting large numbers of weak enemies, as he was now. He had gotten so used to spinning and one-shotting Nepenthes that were grouped up that he could mostly keep his attention on the boss itself during his battle rather than on the boss's swarm of minions.

It felt a lot like mowing a lawn actually, now that he thought about it. He was just cutting the grass with his swords instead. Weeding.

Kirito watched as the boss looped through its attacks again. First its vines, then its acid, then it pulled out the exploding fruit, popped it, then it walked over to get into range of him again and then repeated the cycle again.

There was nothing truly dangerous during any of that, so Kirito had dropped almost all of his lingering concerns and started fighting seriously.

Not for the first time, Kirito wondered what he looked like when he started fighting like this. He was upside down almost as often as he was right side up, due to the ease that the acrobatics skill allowed him to flip and spin.

The lack of dizziness experienced in-game allowed him free access to essentially do whatever crazy maneuvers that he wanted without repercussions.

What would that look like?

He tried imagining another player doing what he was, but he couldn't quite visualize it.

It must look so weird to a spectator, he thought.

He was spinning about as often as usual. Which equated to whenever he had the chance to, or pretty much every time his feet touched the ground.

After completing the first spin in a chain, he typically had a lot of rotational momentum left over when his feet hit the ground again, which made it very easy to simply jump into another spin.

Sometimes, he didn't even need to use another Sonic Leap to initiate it either. He would have enough residual momentum to spin again without having to use another skill to initiate it. And it did not escape his notice that, if he had not learned how to fight like this, if he had not developed his death spin, this swarm and boss would have probably killed him by now, surrounded as he was.

Fighting with one sword and with both feet on the ground severely limited what he was capable of and he didn't even notice it back when he did it all the time.

But with his new style, he was basically doing the work of an entire party, himself.

He was drawing the attention of the boss, keeping the minions at bay, and soon, he'd be responsible for the DPS on the boss as well.

That took multiple people to pull off in a normal party.

He didn't need one.

He no longer needed to form a party to fight bosses effectively, he realized.

He wouldn't want to either, even if his cursor suddenly turned green right that second and stayed that way permanently.

He had been a solo player before all of this, and he had understood that it could be very limiting. But now, as he initiated another sequence of death spins, he realized just how liberating it could be.

There was no way that he could work effectively with a party anymore. Any attempt on his part to restrict himself into one task would severely hamper his own effectiveness. He would have to hold back a lot, all the time, no matter his role.

He hated holding back.

He was a party on his own.

He was more effective on his own than an entire party of six that he was a member of would be.

It was quite possible that in the future, he might even be able to solo floor bosses like this.

Wouldn't that be something?

The boss's exploding fruits were larger than normal, which, as he had anticipated, meant that the swarm it had called in would be larger. And since the swarm itself contained even more fruited Nepenthes, there was an endless feedback loop of dozens and dozens of Nepenthes constantly arriving in the clearing.

The explosions from the fruit happened every thirty seconds or so now, and the air was filled with the sounds of flailing vines, and the machine-gun rate of acid attacks splatting on the ground.

The cacophony of noise was so familiar to him however, after hearing it for so long, that it was basically white noise to him now.

Due to the larger swarm, however, he wasn't quite able to clear them all out before the next wave spawned in, so he was going to have to fight the boss, he realized, while he was fighting the swarm itself.

Which could take a while, he thought.

But he had spent hours at a time fighting at this pace before, so he was used to it, and he could do it again. If he somehow couldn't, then he still had that teleport crystal on him.

* * *

He was about 30 minutes into the fight now, and after getting used to the boss's attack patterns, the fight turned into one of his typical grinding sessions. Whenever there was an opening, however, he'd spin into the boss's roots, and then re-engage the surrounding swarm.

That swarm was actually the most dangerous part of this whole battle. If he stopped whittling it down for even a few seconds, it would start restricting the space he was using to move around in.

At the moment, he was at the center of the swarm, and so was the boss. The swarm was arranged in a ring that was trying to close in on all sides, and he was having to zig-zag to keep the center of the ring as clear as possible.

And every time he switched sides, he'd strike the boss a few times.

Usually, he would have to allow the swarm on one side to advance while he ripped through the other side, allowing him to escape the ring, at least until the next swarms started arriving.

But the fight was actually surprisingly easy so far. It was really just tedious.

The boss's attacks would always miss him, and would usually take out a group of its own minions.

Friendly fire was a very common occurrence amongst Nepenthes, apparently. And that was another thing that Kirito took shameless advantage of. He would deliberately kite the Nepenthes he was too busy to kill in a specific way, so that the boss would take them out with its own attacks.

The battle proceeded just like every one of his previous ones, and he slowly lowered the mini-boss's health.

* * *

It took him just over an hour to finally kill it, which left him with just the swarm of Nepenthes. A swarm that would no longer be as large as it had been previously, due to the boss not using its larger exploding fruit to summon any more super swarms to add in to the mix.

The fight was now no different than the end of one of his typical Nepenthe hunting sessions, which meant that he was near the end. He just had to clear out the rest.

The thought reinvigorated him, so Kirito radically sped up his attacks. He spun faster, hit harder, and the swarm thinned out. Eventually, it was gone. All that was left at that point, was the new Nepenthe swarm currently inbound from the last fruit, which Kirito left the clearing entirely to deal with.

He would come to them.

He deliberately ignored the fruited Nepenthes until the end. Killing all others leaving only those ones remaining. This was the only way he knew of to stop the endless loop, and it was the way he had to end all of his grinding sessions ever since hitting Nepenthe escape velocity.

An exploding fruit would not go off if he insta-killed the Nepenthe carrying it. The problem had always been other Nepenthes accidentally smacking them with a stray vine, so he got rid of all of those first, and didn't let the remaining Nepenthes pile up.

And since there were no more ordinary ones at that point, he was able to kill each of the fruited Nepenthes in one shot, preventing any of the fruits from bursting.

And after that was done, there were no more Nepenthes and the battle was over.

* * *

The sheer number of Nepenthes he had killed before starting the quest had significantly raised the difficulty of it, he was pretty sure.

With each kill under his belt, he had increased the spawn rate of a fruited Nepenthe. So in that last swarm, if he hadn't had over 10,000 nepenthe kills, there would have been much fewer minions to deal with, making the quest a lot easier.

Or at least shorter, anyways.

Kirito found the quest NPC again after a short time and spoke to him. The man thanked him profusely, and gave Kirito his reward.

A lot of experience. A surprising amount actually. Which sort of confirmed his suspicion that this quest was meant for a much higher levelled player than him.

The quest had given him a level, after all. Which was crazy when he considered how high leveled he already was.

He was level 16 now. That amount of xp had been the equivalent of about four days of Nepenthe grinding. A crazy amount, and enough to confirm Kirito's earlier suspicions that it was meant to be shared amongst multiple players. There was no way that this quest was meant to be soloed, but it rewarded handsomely anyone who could do so.

He got a lot of cor for completing it, too. Which was pretty much useless to him since he couldn't trade or buy anything from shops,

He also got a ring. It was called the Ring of Acid. An item he had never even heard of before, so he was probably the first to ever get it.

It had a strange set of abilities. It gave a simple STR and AGI boost, like most rings, but it also had an ability to teleport the holder to the location of the Nepenthe boss he had just killed. There were pretty severe restrictions on when it could be used, however. It would have been a pretty broken item if he could just teleport there at any time, as that would make emergency teleport crystals useless.

So there were some restrictions. Teleporting with it took time, for one. A lot of time, actually. Kirito had never seen an ability delay as long as this one before. After activating the effect, there was a five minute activation time during which he couldn't move at all. If he were attacked in that time, or if he moved, the effect would cancel immediately.

So all it really did was remove the inconvenience that walking all the way here from the closest inn provided. Still useful, especially since the location of the boss was only a few minutes away from his cave, but the effect was useless as a means to quickly escape in an emergency, or any other dangerous situation.

Teleport crystals were still the only option for that.

Five minutes was a long time when in an emergency severe enough to require teleporting. _Thirty seconds_ was a long time in those situations. Was a five minute timer really necessary? It was actually kind of annoying how long that was. Kirito understood the purpose behind it, but two minutes could have accomplished the same task, in his opinion. Why drag it out for five?

It was irritating, especially now that he realized that he would still be using it in the future regardless. That waiting five minutes was still better than walking all the way over here from the center of the floor.

He could already foresee himself sitting around with nothing to do for five minutes somewhere, patiently waiting for the effect to finally activate.

That would get old, fast.

There was another restriction on the ring, too. It had charges. The boss nepenthe dropped a vial of acid that, when used on the ring, would give it one charge. This meant that every time he used the ring to teleport, he would have to kill the boss nepenthe again to get another charge for it, because the ring had started out with zero charges.

He had applied the acid he had just received to the ring however, as the quest NPC had guided him to, so the ring now had one charge in it.

He couldn't farm any more, though. He could fight that Nepenthe boss no more than once per day. It just wouldn't show up if he tried to fight it more often than that. It was a repeatable encounter. He could return to the location to fight the boss again if he wanted to, but only once every day.

He wouldn't get that crazy amount of xp next time, either. That had been a one time thing. He'd just get some decent drops, including at least one guaranteed rare drop, and a typical amount of xp for killing a repeatable miniboss.

It was still a significant step up from his typical Nepenthe grinding however, that was for sure. But still not enough to level up in a single day.

He'd be surprised if he made it to level 17 before the next floor opened up, in fact. He was something like eight days away from it, using his typical Nepenthe strategy.

He might be able to cut that down to seven days, or maybe even six with this new repeatable mini boss added to his daily training, but he was clearly over leveled for this floor. Possibly over levelled for the next floor, too. And that was six days of hard grinding, which he had already decided to take a break from. He wanted to max out his Hiding skill first, and the days that he took to max out that skill wouldn't count towards his total towards leveling up in general, since he couldn't grind during them.

So it was looking pretty unlikely that he would reach 17 by the time the next floor opened up. Surely the other players had to be close to defeating the floor boss by now. They had to be. When he had reached level 17 in the beta, the test had been almost over. His highest level had been 18 back then, and he had been on floor 9 when he reached it.

Now he was level 16 and still stuck on the first floor. It was crazy how much things had changed.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	7. The Grind

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Out of curiosity, Kirito talked to the quest NPC again, as sometimes, they would offer post-quest rewards or other useful information.

This particular NPC did actually do that.

He gave out larger and larger Nepenthe slaying contracts, and if the player he gave them to completed them, he'd give an experience reward and he'd upgrade the Ring of Acid.

Which actually made Kirito a bit excited.

The NPC handed him the next contract, and it was for 5,000 Nepenthes. But it reset to zero, as Kirito had killed that many a long time ago.

So, he handed the empty sheet back.

And he gained a fifth of a level from that one contract alone. That was a massive chunk of experience.

The ring had also been upgraded to an Enchanted Ring of Acid. Granting it a slight increase in its STR and AGI stat boosts, and also giving it the ability to hold multiple charges at once.

It had started out with the ability to only hold a single charge, but now he could stack them by applying that giant Nepenthe's acid to the ring, while it already had charges stored up on it.

Kirito talked to the man again.

20,000 this time.

Which again, he had killed. Though admittedly, the numbers on those contracts were starting to get out of hand. Even for him.

Now he was almost two thirds of the way to the next level, after getting that xp drop. Another huge chunk of xp, which blew his previous expectations of where his level would be at by the end of the floor right out of the water.

There was a good chance he'd make it to level 17 now. It was 18 that was looking unlikely.

His new ring was also turned into an Imbued Enchanted Ring of Acid. Which again, despite the overly cliched name, increased its stat boosts a significant amount.

But it made him wonder. What was next? The 'Supreme Imbued Enchanted Ring of Acid?' How many more fancy descriptors were going to be tacked onto the thing by the end?

' _I guess I'll just have to wait and see…'_ Kirito thought to himself.

He wouldn't be surprised if his ring was currently the best ring in the entire game.

Those stat boosts were incredible for a ring.

It was actually the best ring he had ever seen, now. Even in all his time in the beta. Even out of all the rings he had seen on the higher floors. Granted, he hadn't seen too many rings in that time, but it provided something like a five percent dps increase just with those stat increases alone.

Was there going to be more of them? More upgrades?

Kirito talked to the man again.

This time, 100,000 Nepenthes. And Kirito was pretty sure that he _didn't_ have that yet.

Sure enough, when Kirito grabbed the card, it switched from 100,000, to around 80,000. Which meant that he had killed just over 45,000 Nepenthes in his entire time in the game so far.

The contracts were cumulative after all. Meaning that the 100,000 he had just been assigned did not include the kills that had been counted for his previous contract of 20,000.

So when it had dropped to 80,000, to calculate his total kills in the game so far, he took that 20,000 difference, and added it to the 20,000 of his previous contract, and the 5,000 of the one before that, etc.

Which technically gave him somewhere around 46,000 kills, if his math was right.

And he had 80,000 left to kill in order to get whatever the next upgrade was. It was also the last upgrade. So whatever it was, it was probably incredibly useful.

46,000 kills, though. Technically just over that, but still. That number simply blew his mind. That was a lot of Nepenthes that he had killed. If his math was right, that averaged to just over 3,000 per day… though that average was skewed severely. There's no way he would have gotten that many kills per day during his first few days out here, but he could easily see himself getting that many post-escape-velocity. And recently, he had probably had days where he had killed over 10,000 of them, after he had gotten fast enough to kill them all before they could pool up.

But now that he really started reflecting on his time in the game so far, if he was being honest... he was getting pretty sick of these Nepenthes.

A hundred thousand Nepenthes was a lot of Nepenthes to kill, just to get a ring upgrade. And he still wasn't even halfway there. Still 80,000 more to go.

He was debating whether he should just grind it out.

But that would severely delay his Hiding training, he realized. And he really needed that cursor hiding ability if he ever wanted to check in on the rest of the players and see if they were close to the boss room yet.

He needed that Hiding ability first, he finally decided.

And that decision came with some relief. He really hadn't noticed how much he wanted to take a break from endlessly grinding on these Nepenthes.

He needed to get that Hiding ability, he needed to check in on the rest of the players with it, and then he needed to get that final ring upgrade.

He also needed to pick his next skill slot.

He was pretty sure he knew what he would pick next, too. It had always been down to either Blacksmithing or Mixing.

The first one would allow him to repair his weapons, and the second would allow him to make his own health potions, poisons, antidotes, and paralysis cures.

And _that_ one was the one he was leaning towards the most at the moment. Mixing.

It was another avenue that other players could take to try to kill him. He had no other means of getting potions other than by making his own or by getting them as drops.

And since getting anti-poisons and the like was all RNG based if he were trying to farm them from monsters, he couldn't expect to get very many that way. He didn't even know which monsters he needed to grind on to get those, either.

He had gotten a few in his training so far, but not very many at all. He'd only received a few, which led him to believe that they were actually on one of the rare drop tables, not one of the lower tiered common ones.

Which meant that he couldn't cure himself if he were ever poisoned unless he could start making them himself.

They just didn't drop from Nepenthes often enough to be reliable.

If he were ever poisoned, that could be it, as he was now. That could kill him easily. He'd have to enter a safezone to save himself if he didn't happen to have the antidote, and people would see him when he did.

If he made it into a city while poisoned, he wouldn't take damage anymore, since players couldn't take any, there. So even if he had been afflicted with an unbelievably strong poison and didn't have the cure, it wouldn't actually damage him there and he could just wait while the poison timer ran out.

But the only city he could make it to quickly was the Town of Beginnings, the only one with a teleport gate on the first floor. Cities with teleport gates were the only places he could get to with a teleport crystal. And all cities with teleport gates had guards in them. Which obviously posed a problem...

To avoid finding himself in that sort of situation, he had to make sure that he had a method to counteract all types of poisons on his own in the future. And having a highly levelled Mixing skill was potentially his only way to do that reliably.

The skill also had an edge over Blacksmithing because he also had a method to power level it, and-

Okay, he was definitely picking Mixing.

A game changing realization had just suddenly struck him.

Mixing was leveled solely by manipulation of the menu. Which could be done while he was using Hide.

Instead of doing nothing while he was grinding out his Hiding skill, he could power level his Mixing skill at the same time.

It was perfect. And while he didn't know a lot about what the Mixing skill could do himself just yet, he did know someone that did have that information.

Argo.

Kirito winced internally.

She knew everything about the skill that he didn't.

She was also the one person he truly hoped to never meet again in person. She would probably murder him right on the spot.

They had met in the beta test, and she had become a good friend of his. She was a very good info broker and had the answers to basically everything... for the right price.

On the first day of the game she had tried to add him as a friend.

Friend requests could be sent to anyone in the game, no matter if they were standing in front of you or not. All you had to know was the username of the player you were trying to add, and you could send a request from anywhere in the game. And since they had known each other from before, they had known each other's usernames at the time.

Problem was, he had been orange when he had received her friend request. And friends could see the cursor colours of each other right next to their names on the friends interface.

If he had accepted her request, she would have found out about his cursor colour, and that would have opened up a conversation that he really didn't want to have with her.

' _So, Ki-bou, why's your cursor orange?'_ She would ask.

' _Oh, that's because I murdered a green player, of course. It's no big deal.'_

So, as much as he wanted to talk to her again, he really didn't want to talk to her again.

Part of him truly wanted to believe that she would understand his situation if he simply told her the truth.

But another part of him recognized a simple fact of all the MMOs he had ever played.

Friends online were not actually friends. You could not truly trust them with anything important.

And Argo was like this as well. The stakes were real now, and people were dying.

You could have deep conversations with them on a lot of things, and could sometimes even connect with them on a far deeper level than anyone in the real world could, because there was that barrier of anonymity that allowed anyone to simply walk away from any interaction at any time.

There were no repercussions for saying whatever you wanted to.

You were safe in the knowledge that if you gave out your darkest secrets, they could never be traced back to you as long as you left out any personal details, and you could seek advice and other opinions on topics that you could never bring up in a real world face to face interaction.

But the moment that anonymity barrier was gone... suddenly, all these things became traceable. Everything he now said to Argo could be pinned on him and it made him feel incredibly exposed.

He had a face now, and so did she.

But more importantly, it was all real. People were dying now, and Kirito didn't know what his relationship to Argo had even been in the first place. They talked to each other a lot, sure, but how many times had he heard her say ' _I'll sell anything for the right price?'_

Well… his cursor colour was a thing. What if someone wanted to buy a list of known orange players from her?

The truth was, that Kirito simply had never understood where he stood with Argo. Was she his friend, or did she see him more as a frequent customer? He had considered her a friend... but did she think the same of him?

She was an info dealer. Which meant that, for all he knew, she could have met him back then and 'befriended' him for the sole purpose of trying to get him to give up something incriminating about himself that she could then sell.

Kirito had been a popular player back then. There were around a dozen of them in total that had been really well known for a variety of reasons. He and a few others were known for their in-game feats of skill, usually involving soloing a particularly challenging monster or boss.

He had been one of the usual winners of the races that all the best players had always found themselves in whenever a new boss or challenge opened up. They would all compete to see who could take it down first, and the winner would have their name spread around.

He almost always won those races himself, and that's why his username had made that list.

Others were known for being famous guild leaders, or just for being a popular public icon. There had even been a few well known livestreamers who, with Kayaba's permission, recorded their experiences in 3D video format and uploaded it for anyone with an internet connection to see.

Free advertisements for the game and all that...

But that handful of players that found themselves in the public eye, whether they wanted it or not, became mini-celebrities.

Now, he wasn't a fan of the spotlight himself, and as a result, he would avoid interaction with others as much as possible, fans included. This caused people to view him as some kind of mysterious figure that would only show up when an important battle was taking place or when something important was happening, and as a result, a lot of people tried to get to know him even more than usual because he was never around.

It all resulted in his name being very well known, despite the fact that almost nobody knew what his avatar looked like.

So when he put himself in Argo's place, and tried to think the way she would, he was able to see what an opportunity that would provide.

Befriend the mysterious Kirito who is never around, and get him to give up something incriminating. People would pay top dollar for something like that.

There was a market for that in the game, just as there was in the real world surrounding celebrities.

And she had commonly threatened him with that back then. It had probably been in jest, but sometimes, whenever she wanted things her way, she would subtly threaten that she would sell some of his secrets if he didn't comply with whatever ridiculous demand she gave out this time.

But this was serious now. He was orange, and he had killed someone. Those secrets could be pinned on him, on Kazuto Kirigaya, after all of this was over, and he didn't truly know what Argo would do with them if she knew.

He just wanted to get out of this game. That was all.

He didn't care about making friends, or about keeping secrets, or even about being lonely, if he could just get out at the end.

He had had a lot of fun with Argo, and Kirito really wanted to believe that he could trust her, but bringing up something like that was a needless risk.

There was a chance, a non-zero probability, that she would rat him out. The odds were probably incredibly small, but he couldn't call them negligible given what he knew about her.

Simply adding her as a friend was potentially life threatening.

So while some part of him would regret not getting to know her again, he had to do what was logical. Not what felt right. And the logical thing to do if he wanted to get out was to reduce the odds of anyone ever finding him by as much as possible and to find ways to help clear the game from the shadows.

He was so thankful that you could only send private messages to people on your friends list. Otherwise, he'd imagine that she would have tried to chew him out for ignoring her requests.

She was… vicious like that. Vicious and pushy.

And he could see a little bit of that in her steadfast determination to get him to accept her requests.

When he hadn't immediately added her back then, she had revoked her request... only to send it again a few moments later, just to ensure that the standard bell-like _ding_ that rung out whenever a player received a friend request had in fact been heard by him.

And when he had ignored that too, she had spent the next ten minutes or so, stubbornly forcing his interface to _ding_ endlessly, as she repeatedly sent him request after request to add her as a friend.

_Argo would like to add you as a friend! Would you like to accept?_

_Yes / No_

_..._

No, Argo. He didn't want to accept.

He just couldn't do that.

Every night since then, she would try again for a few minutes, causing his interface to ding again, repeatedly... but he never answered her.

He wasn't going to lie, if he never heard that dinging noise again, it would be too soon. It was so annoying to hear it on repeat, especially when he was trying to sleep.

But he had no choice but to deal with it.

Well... he could stop her from repeatedly sending those requests, but only by blocking or muting her.

But she would not be happy at all if she suddenly received the message:

_You have been muted by Kirito. You can no longer send messages to this player._

It would be even worse if she were blocked.

Knowing her, she'd probably immediately mobilize her entire spy network to hunt him down.

So, to avoid that, he had decided to go all in on 'plausible deniability.'

She couldn't be absolutely sure that Kirito was still his username, or that he was even in the game at all, for that matter. It was definitely likely, in her mind, but she couldn't be certain.

One of the most common annoyances that players had with the game was the fact that you could send friend requests to players that didn't exist. Which meant that you weren't given feedback if you mistyped the name of the person you were trying to add, for example.

It was a consequence of the fact that you could send requests to players that weren't online, though, so it couldn't really be fixed.

The system simply didn't know if the player you sent a friend request to was just offline at the moment, or if they didn't exist at all. It couldn't make that distinction. Because what if the player was signing in for the first time ever, for example?

The system would have no data of the player's existence yet. But it was also desirable to be able to just send a single friend request to that person, if you knew that they would sign in eventually, instead of having to wait for them to sign in for the first time to do so.

That way you could just send the request and forget it, and when that new player signed in for the first time, they'd immediately get the friend request.

But the consequence of this was that it was possible to send requests to players that didn't exist by either mistyping their usernames, or by typing a username that no player had.

So, from Argo's perspective, if Kirito did absolutely nothing in response to her requests, neither muting, nor accepting, she may conclude that he simply hadn't signed in on that first day.

Eventually, if he did nothing for long enough, she would keep doubting herself that he was even in the game, and she'd give up eventually.

Because why else would he ignore her requests? She would think.

 _Hopefully_ , that's what she would think.

So, if she suddenly found out that he was alive and in the game, and had just been ignoring her for weeks... she would not be happy at all.

And he honestly didn't think he could face her reaction to him being an orange player either.

But none of that meant he couldn't still get information from Argo.

If he mastered the ability to hide his cursor, he could sit in a bar or a restaurant, so long as the place wasn't in a town that had guards.

That realization had struck him during one of his grinding sessions a few days earlier.

He could do that because when a player was indoors, the game didn't show the player's cursor colour. Since it was a safe zone, PKers couldn't hurt anyone so it was pointless to show one for them, and Green players would be stuck eating at a restaurant, having to stare at giant floating green cursors over everyone's head.

Because of that, SAO was programmed so that in certain locations, a cursor wouldn't be shown for any player.

Which meant that if he had his own cursor hidden, nobody would notice the difference. And this meant that he could go into a bar to hire someone to get the information he needed as long as nobody saw his missing cursor before entering, or after leaving.

While he was inside, everyone else would think that he was just another player who had had his cursor hidden automatically by the system.

And as long as the money he paid this hypothetical player wasn't sent over a trade request, the person he hired wouldn't notice that he was orange at all.

And there was a way to do that too. It was a little risky, but he just had to relinquish his control over the money and spawn it in game as an item.

He'd spawn in a bag of cor, relinquish his control, and give it to the player.

And if he got scammed, and the person simply ran off with the money, he had loads more to try again with. He couldn't use cor to buy anything. So he had a whole bunch of it just sitting in his inventory.

He'd hire a middleman to get the info out of Argo, and then he'd return to his cave.

Simple as that.

But first, he had to power level both Mixing and Hiding. That meant he had to go into his cave and stay there for a few days.

It would be a mindless grind, but he was prepared for that. He had pulled all nighters in other MMOs before, on those.

He knew what to expect.

* * *

Since he knew so little about the Mixing skill, he only knew of two ways to train it with the items he had on him at the moment.

He had figured that he could use his massive stockpile of Nepenthe parts in his inventory to make something, but he hadn't known what at first.

After placing the Mixing skill in his fourth slot however, he was granted the ability to use an ingredient log.

Which was, essentially, a list of potions that could be made with various items. The log started out empty, but would gradually fill in as he experimented with mixing ingredients together.

With it, and the few things he did know about the skill from the beta, he had learned that he could make two things with the items he had on hand.

He knew that he could make a very weak antipoison from the various Nepenthe drops that he had collected, and he knew that he could make a decently strong poison from the ovule that the special type of Nepenthes dropped.

Just like the fruited Nepenthes, the ones with the flower had also radically increased in spawn rate as he hit escape velocity, so he had a lot of ovules on him.

2500, in fact. Which was crazy to see, considering how rare he used to consider them.

And with each of those ovules, he could make ten potions. Each of which generated a significant amount of experience.

Mixing was what most beta testers referred to as a _buyable_ skill.

You didn't need a large time investment to level it up, and instead, if you happened to be rich, you could buy a large stockpile of the best ingredients beforehand and max it out it in just a couple of days.

The Nepenthe ovule was a very expensive ingredient. And using it for making potions was typically a pretty stupid move unless you were filthy rich, as a result.

It was usually just better to sell them.

The potion they produced wasn't very useful, the ovules were very expensive, as they could be traded for an Anneal Blade, and even the xp for making the poison, while very good, was not the most cost effective method of training the skill in the game.

There were better methods.

Ways to level up the skill cheaply, which took longer, and ways to level up faster, which cost more. It was always a trade off between time and money, but the ovule method wasn't an optimal one for either, though it leaned much further towards saving time then it did towards saving money.

There were ways to get faster experience if he just had access to player owned shops, but since he couldn't trade with anyone, and because as rich as he was, he was nowhere near rich enough to use the really fast methods of training, he was stuck with the ovule method for now.

But perhaps 'stuck with' was a bit of an unfair description for the current situation. Because the method was fantastic for experience, even though it wasn't optimal. Especially considering how many he had on him at the moment.

He could make 25,000 potions with the amount that he had, as each ovule produced ten of them, each. It was not enough experience to max out the skill on its own, but it was enough to get him about halfway there, he was pretty sure.

Mixing wasn't a very useful skill for most players, so it was actually one of the cheapest buyable skills in the game. Though 'cheapest' was a relative term, as it was still unaffordable to pretty much every single player in the game at the moment...

Crafting, another buyable skill, was much more expensive to max. Probably a hundred times more than Mixing, in fact. And that was because the skill just had so many uses, and was so profitable to have a high level in.

In the beta, buyable skills had been the only ones that people had been able to successfully level to a thousand. All the others had been too time dependent to be maxed in just one month.

Most players would never use an ovule like this in this situation. They would probably sell it because they were just so expensive.

Nobody else knew about the fact that you could make them so much more common by just grinding and grinding Nepenthes endlessly. Nepenthe escape velocity was something he had discovered himself. In a location that nobody else had ever been to before.

If he were green, and he sold off all of his ovules... he'd probably single handedly break the economy with the sheer amount that he had. And he'd be stupidly rich after, too.

So, when he started mixing his first ovule potion, a small part of him felt like it died, after watching the amount of wealth he was throwing away, suddenly vanish.

* * *

Kirito woke up in his sleeping bag.

He took note of the time, and glanced at his levels.

_One handed sword: 52/1000_

_Hiding: 701/1000_

_Mixing: 841/1000_

_Acrobatics: 91/1000_

He was very satisfied with what he saw.

Combat skills were, almost without exception, the longest skills to level up, and buyables, the fastest.

He was a bit surprised at his progress with Acrobatics, too. It leveled up very fast during his fights now, considering all of the flipping and spinning he did in the middle of them…

It turned out that his new fighting style gave out a lot of Acrobatics xp. He'd have to get some more information on what the higher levels of that skill unlocked. He had only known about the flexibility enhancement that it provided when he took it up originally.

But were there actual sword skill like abilities that he could do with it too? Or any other useful abilities he needed to know about?

He still had a lot that he needed to learn.

He yawned, and glanced at his Hiding skill in the interface.

He still had Hide active, and he was still getting experience drops every couple of seconds.

Large ones too.

They were the largest experience drops he had ever seen in a skill before. And they would only increase in size in the future, as he continued to leave the skill active.

He had tried to maximize the efficiency of his time in game recently, so he had decided to pull a couple of back-to-back all-nighters.

He knew that future Kirito would thank him for making so much progress when he was done, so he had spent the last eighty-five hours straight, before he'd finally crashed, grinding out the Mixing skill.

In that time, he had gained 840 levels in it, after sinking the equivalent of about fifty million cor of wealth, into the skill.

That was roughly the price of 2,500 Nepenthe ovules at this stage of the game, assuming each one was being bought for about twenty thousand.

So, he had burned through a lot of wealth, but he had nearly maxed out a skill.

But he didn't really know what he'd unlocked yet with his levels.

One of the best and worst things about this game was that most unlocks were kept a secret, and had to be discovered by the player.

Which meant that his 841 / 1000 in Mixing didn't suddenly mean he knew how to make any crazy potions. In fact, he knew almost nothing more about the skill now than he had during his painfully tedious multi-day grind session the previous few days.

He knew that he had unlocked an ability at some point that granted him a small chance to make twice as many potions as normal, or to save an ingredient, because that had started happening during his grind, and it had happened more often the higher his level rose, but that was about it. Other than that, he was starving for Mixing information, and he'd have to get it from Argo.

The grind had been tedious.

Cook the ovule over the fire. Squeeze it out over a pot. Use ten empty vials on the liquid. Dump the liquid out. Repeat.

Endlessly repeat.

He had kept the empty vials that had been left over from drinking his health potions over his grinding sessions, and he had used them for this power levelling process.

Thankfully, he had decided to keep everything, including typically useless junk items like vials, and had decided early on to recycle everything he used as much as possible.

If he hadn't, he would have needed to pick up a skill that allowed glassblowing to make them, or he would have had to dump out his emergency stash of potions to use the empty vials from those instead.

Which would have sucked.

Due to the fact that he had unlocked the surprise ability to save an ingredient every now and then too, he had actually levelled up much more than he had originally planned with those ovules.

He had made over 30,000 potions with them, and was finished in about 40 hours.

Since he had only predicted that he could make 25,000 potions with that supply, he had been pleasantly surprised with the extra 5,000.

But then he had to switch to his other method of training. And this one, annoyingly enough, required water.

He had the containers for it though. Twenty four of them, in fact. From the Boar Stomachs he had picked up early on.

Luckily, it had been night time at the time, so he had been able to travel around outside his cave with his Hide ability still active, with minimal risk of it being broken by sunlight.

He had walked to the stream he usually got his water from, filled all of the containers up, and returned to his cave.

Each full container could make 400 potions, and water was always the limiting factor. He had so many Nepenthe parts that could be used in the potion that he would likely never run out of them.

So he had used all 24 water containers in a similar process as with the ovules.

Pour the water in the container over his fire. Put in the Nepenthe parts. Cook the mixture. Use the empty vials on the mixture. Dump them out so they can be reused. Repeat.

All the potions he made went to waste, but all he cared about was the xp so it didn't matter.

This type of training was much slower than when he had used the ovules. And he had to make multiple trips to the stream to refill on water, which forced him to have to get creative in his methods of getting there when the sun came out.

He really didn't want his Hide ability to cancel, so he had been very careful. He stuck to the shadows whenever he had to step outside during the daytime in order to avoid the light and stay out of sight of any NPCs.

Even though it was unlikely that his Hiding level was low enough for Hide to be broken so easily, he didn't want to risk losing such a high rate of experience. So he had been extremely careful anyways.

He had lost count of the number of water refill trips he had had to make during that grinding session because he had been so tired and unfocused. He really didn't remember a lot of anything during the last day or so of the grind, but there had been a lot of them.

And he still had a lot left to do.

With a clear head after crashing for ten hours after the session, he had decided to do it again.

He had done the math, and he knew that he had the materials on him to max out the skill. It would take him a lot of water trips, but again, future Kirito would thank him for it.

* * *

Leveling up was not linear. Going from level 800 to level 801 in a skill took considerably more xp then leveling up from 400 to 401 did.

As a result, the halfway point to maxing wasn't at level 500 / 1000. It was somewhere around level 750. So he was past the halfway point, but still a long ways off from maxing, despite his already impressive 841 in Mixing.

This would be another very tedious grinding session, he realized.

After doing the math, he knew how many trips he needed to take to the stream, and based on his average time per potion from the previous day, he figured that this grinding session would be about as long as the previous one.

Another 80 hours or so.

He was not looking forward to it at all.

* * *

He woke up to the sound of his interface dinging.

' _Dammit Argo, just give up,'_ had been his first thought.

But then he noticed that the tone wasn't quite the same as the friend request one, and he looked at his screen, and in particular, at his levels.

One handed sword: 52/1000

Hiding: 1000/1000

Mixing: 1000/1000

Acrobatics: 91/1000

The interface had been _ding_ -ing because sometime in the middle of the night, his Hiding skill had finally been maxed out.

He could finally turn it off and do stuff again.

He had been too exhausted to hear it apparently, and had only just woken up now.

Kirito yawned and looked at the time.

That grinding session had probably been the worst grind he had ever been on, out of all the MMOs he had ever played.

95 hours straight.

His math from earlier had been off. He had made the assumption that he could continue making potions at the same rate regardless of how tired he was. Which was unrealistic.

He was 15 hours off in his estimate as a result.

And it was a miracle he'd even made it through that at all. He had crashed for twelve hours after he had finally finished.

It was now day 24 of the death game. His grind had eaten up a little over eight days. Almost one month had gone by since the start, and he had yet to hear any announcement declaring that the first floor had been cleared.

And that honestly made him wonder what was taking so long for the other players to beat the first boss. Surely the beta testers could have beaten it by now, so what was the hold up?

Was everyone just being overly cautious?

He'd have to go check out the situation there after he figured out how to use that cursor hiding ability, first.

Kirito stood up and exited his cave.

* * *

Skills only listed a limited amount of information to the player at first.

But as a player experimented with the skill a little more, more and more data would be available in the skill description.

His Hiding skill worked the same way, and he had had to try out a bunch of stuff before he finally learned what he needed to do.

He had activated his Hide skill and walked right into the middle of a group of Nepenthes at first. And he had learned that, as he had anticipated, a player with an advanced Hiding skill _could_ hide themselves from NPC's that didn't use eyes… sort of.

A maxed Hiding skill gave the player a very advanced interface.

He could see a meter on ambient brightness, the amount of noise he was making, and even the wind direction.

And if he always stayed downwind, the Nepenthes wouldn't find him since they relied on smell.

Doing this had also filled out the corresponding information in his Hiding skill menu, too. It now explained that there was a new class of monsters he could hide from by taking into account wind direction while hiding.

In his Hide interface, one of the other things he immediately took note of was just how good the skill actually was now.

He was in the middle of a field, standing upright, in broad daylight, with no cover, and with enemies all around him, and still his camouflage hadn't broken.

He could even make a little bit of noise, and be perfectly fine.

It was a _very_ powerful ability, now.

And it took him a while to find it, but on his new interface, he finally managed to find a toggle that hid his cursor from view.

It had no restrictions either. It could be hidden indefinitely, even in combat.

When it was active, however, he had an indicator showing how well hidden it was. If someone with a high searching level looked in his direction, the hide rate of his cursor would decrease, and might in fact, cause his cursor to reappear if it went to zero.

And players would obviously notice that something was off with him if he was walking around without a cursor at all. So the ability was really only useful in a handful of situations. But that was enough.

He was pretty sure that there was more to the skill that he just hadn't learned yet, but he'd find it all out eventually.

It was time to test out the ability for real.

He was going back to Horunka.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	8. The Walk Back

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

It all came down to his Hide Rate. When a player wanted to use the Hide skill modifier, they had to open up their menu, find the Hiding skill in their list of skills, select it, and then select the mod to turn it on. That ability turned them completely invisible to everything, even hiding their cursor, and it gave them a new interface which displayed something that was known as a Hide Rate.

It was essentially a health bar. Environmental factors such as brightness and lack of cover would inflict damage to this bar, lowering the player's Hide Rate. But as long as the bar wasn't empty, the hiding player's camouflage wouldn't break.

Kirito however, had managed to get to such an advanced Hiding level that the environment couldn't break the camouflage on its own as far as he could tell. Maybe if there was something as bright as a searchlight directed right at him, that would do it, but for the most part, the only way he could think of where his Hide Rate would hit zero was with a player using the Searching skill on him.

Being on this end of the Hiding skill was an interesting experience. Back in the beta, he had picked up the Searching skill and had used it all the time. He had regularly found hidden players with it too, so he knew what the hunt felt like when he was the one trying to find people.

The Searching skill did a lot of things, but one of them was that it 'damaged' the Hide Rate of hidden objects. Players included. But when he had used it back then on players that had wanted to hide from him, there was this weird game of cat and mouse that would usually ensue, especially when the hidden player was actually _really_ good at utilizing the Hiding skill.

There was a threshold on the Hide Rate bar of the hidden player that, when damaged to that point by a searching player, would give a _ding_ like sound to the searching player, indicating that the place that they had been looking at had something hidden in it. But that _ding_ wouldn't happen immediately. There was a delay between hovering over the hidden player and hearing the sound. The length of that delay was calculated by taking into account both the hidden player's Hiding level, and the searching players Searching level. The higher the hiding player's Hiding level was, the longer that delay would be, and similarly, the higher the searching player's Searching level, the shorter the delay would be. So if both players had maxed out skills for their respective roles, the delay would converge to some number. But when there was a vast disparity between these levels, some pretty unusual things tended to happen. When someone had a very high Searching level, they could instantly shatter the camouflage of a low leveled Hiding player without warning, for example. Which was convenient when you were the one searching, but annoying if you weren't.

But when the reverse was true, and someone had a very high Hiding level and was hiding from a low levelled Searching player, there were situations where the searching player would know exactly where the hidden player was and was staring straight at them, but due to the monstrous Hide Rate of the hidden player, the camouflage wouldn't be damaged fast enough to deactivate. It was like trying to kill a floor boss by throwing stones at it. It was pretty much useless when the level disparity was that large. The boss would passively heal more damage then it was taking from the rocks, and it could literally just sit there watching you throw stones at it forever, without the slightest inconvenience. Even if the hidden player was pinned in a corner, they could still escape with relative ease.

In cases like these, what had often ended up happening back in the beta was the searching player, out of frustration, would finally just get some of their friends over to activate _their_ Searching skills as well, so that they could all pile on the damage to the hidden player's Hide Rate, together.

It was possible to stand right in front of a low levelled Searching player, with the camouflage up, even when the hidden player knew that they had been found. The hidden player wouldn't even have to put effort into escaping anymore, they could just stand there as if to say:

_I'm right here. You know I'm right here. But what are you going to do about it?_

As long as the hidden player dodged any angry attacks thrown at them by the searching player, the camouflage wouldn't break.

Someone had done that to him once, back in the beta test, and having that player escape from him, even after he had by all measures found them, simply because the damn camouflage wouldn't break because he was too low levelled at the time, had been a very powerful motivator to finally start seriously training his Searching skill.

Kirito was on the other end of things now. _He_ was the hidden player with the monstrous Hide Rate. He could be that guy, now. He had no intentions of being that annoying, though. His life sort of depended on not being found, ever. As a result, despite his massively overpowered Hide Rate bar, he had mentally selected a threshold, about a quarter way in, that he had determined was dangerous to go below.

It was somewhere around there where the threshold required for a searching player to get a _ding_ , was, and since that could potentially start one of those cat and mouse games, it seemed like a good idea to draw the line there to play it safe. The bottom 75% of his bar would act as his insurance.

Walking around in broad daylight without cover, with little care about how noisy his footsteps were, lowered that rate to about 80% when he had Hide active. It was so overpowered now. He was basically a walking bubble of invisibility when he wanted to be.

It made him wonder, though. He had discovered, by accident, that power levelling method for the Hiding skill that he had used. By activating Hide and leaving it on indefinitely, the rate at which he was getting xp slowly increased. Then by leaving it on for days at a time, he had maxed the skill outright.

Were other skills like that? The Searching skill had a modifier as well. It actually had a few. Tracking was one of them, and it would show the footsteps of players on your friend list. By not having friends, Kirito had mostly avoided ever being found this way, but could it be used to power level like that?

Detection was another one. Giving you the ability to have telescopic vision, and hunt down people and things that were hidden. Could it be used in that way too?

He didn't know.

Searching was just a useful skill in general. But if it could be power levelled than it would be so much better. Automatic, passive detection, the ability to see traps with ease, a ton of modifiers… It was just so versatile, and a ton of players took it up as a result. It was considered one of the handful of core skills that really everybody should select at some point if they ever intended to travel outside of safe zones.

But that Detection modifier, or even the Tracking one... what would happen if a player left that on for a week straight? Would that max out the skill?

One day, Kirito knew that he would take up that skill. He'd have to try that out when he did.

* * *

Trees, trees, and more trees. The walk back was so annoying to deal with. He couldn't even run either, because he had to hack his way through the bush since it was so unbelievably dense. It had its upsides, how difficult the route was. Virtually nobody would want to come this way to explore, and therefore nobody would ever find him, but going back through the other way, back to Horunka was so annoying and time consuming.

There was no path, and he was navigating based on his floor map. But since that wasn't all that precise, he could not simply retrace the exact steps he had taken on his way to his cave in the first place on that first day. He had tried, but there were just too many trees crammed together.

Instead, he had given up on that and decided to simply point in the direction of the village, and try to make his way there in as close to a straight line as possible. But after the third dead end, he eventually decided to simply take a seat in a small gap he had found in the trees to take a bit of a break. There was barely enough room to sit down, and if he looked up, he couldn't even see the bottom of the second floor above him. The canopy got in the way.

Letting out a sigh, he opened up his menu and started going through it. He'd start moving again in a couple of minutes, he decided.

* * *

Or not. Kirito's eyes widened in slight surprise as he noticed the new abilities in his Hiding skill menu.

They hadn't been there earlier. What had changed? Why were they there now? Nothing important had happened that he could remember.

He had put on that cloak that he had received as an uncommon drop off a Nepenthe earlier. It had almost no bonuses or effects of any kind, though. Nothing to warrant a new ability.

Glancing at his interface, he noted the names of the two abilities. Mask, and Rigid Cloak.

So the abilities did have something to do with cloaks. He guessed that it made sense that he hadn't unlocked them yet, then. SAO hid as many abilities that it could from the players. Even when you had the level requirements for them, if you hadn't actually been introduced to them somehow, or had stumbled upon a situation where they revealed themselves, they wouldn't show up in your menu and you couldn't use them. In most cases, you wouldn't even know about them, either.

So while he had put a cloak on before now, he hadn't had his maxed Hiding level at the time, so he had missed one of the requirements for it to show up. At least that was his best guess.

He was still wearing that cloak. He had figured that he probably should put it on before he got to Horunka since it did a passable job at hiding his face. Anything that he ever did in the game that made him recognizable could follow him for the rest of his life, so this was a necessary precaution.

But putting on the cloak had been the last requirement, apparently, to unlock these abilities.

It'd be easy enough to test. If he took the cloak off now, he'd expect to see the abilities grey themselves out, or vanish entirely. That's what would happen if they only worked when he wore the thing, anyways. So he gave it a try, and sure enough, the abilities vanished.

Putting the cloak back on, they reappeared.

' _Interesting,_ ' he thought to himself. He had to be wearing a cloak to use them.

Kirito opened up the ability descriptions to read up on them a little more.

Rigid Cloak had a complicated explanation for such a seemingly minor ability. It was the one he tested out first. Basically, it prevented the hood of his cloak from coming down when he didn't want it to. Sort of. It actually contoured the cloak to the body of the player wearing it so that it always moved around in such a way that it would maintain its shape. Really, the entire workings of the ability could be seen from the fact that he was doing a handstand at the moment with it on.

If this were real life, the loosely dangling, fluttery bit at the bottom of the cloak would have draped over his head. But it didn't. He could still feel the cloak wrapped snugly around his legs, and his character's base equipment that he had on just underneath. The hood didn't even come down.

It was convenient, he supposed. He wouldn't have to worry about a sudden gust of wind blowing his hood down at an inopportune moment anymore.

Mask was up next. He stood up before activating the ability. After pressing the button on his menu, his vision tinted as if he were wearing a pair of sunglasses.

Pretty self explanatory what this one did, then. The description of it had confirmed it either way. It blacked out his face. Simple as that. It had its own Hide Rate bar which, like any other, could be 'damaged' by a searching player, or by environmental effects.

It was a strange experience, though. His hood was up, and it was covering his eyes. If this were real life, he wouldn't be able to see at all. But he could. Which meant that he could see through his own cloak from the inside. Getting a strange idea to test out the extent of this weird feature, Kirito grabbed his hood with both hands and twisted it 90 degrees to the side, while he remained facing forwards.

In this new position, his hood covered his entire face, and the opening of it exposed his right ear and cheek. But he could still see through it. He could twist the cloak right around if he wanted to, making it so that he literally had the thing on backwards, with the opening of the hood exposing the back of his head, and he could still see through it like that. It was like some sort of one-way invisibility cloak.

Doing some more tests, Kirito figured out a few other things. The ability to see through the fabric of his own cloak from the inside was a separate passive ability. It had nothing to do with Mask or Rigid Cloak. Additionally, with Rigid Cloak he could pull his own hood down with ease. It only restricted environmental factors and other players from unmasking him.

Glancing back at his menu, he opened up his ability descriptions again. They were different, now. They had more information in them. Testing out the extent of his abilities could reveal more information about them. All of the relevant information he had just discovered was now explained clearly in his skill guide.

How many other undiscovered abilities did he already have the requirements for but were still unlisted? He was going to need to do some extensive experimentation later. He had other skills after all. What could Acrobatics do? Literally the only thing he knew about that skill was that it improved his flexibility, and gave him a boost to his AGI stat somehow, but in a weird and counter-intuitive way.

AGI wasn't very helpful as an indicator. Speed simply couldn't be reduced to a single number. There had to be a bunch of hidden variables about his character that could not be seen but that those sorts of skills affected. Leveling up AGI was probably only part of the picture. In fact, based on what he had seen so far, he wouldn't be surprised if leveling up AGI did different things for different people.

Two people that had the same AGI stat might have different top speeds depending on how the system had analyzed a characters playstyle. A ninja was different than an Olympic sprinter. But who was faster? They were just different. But players just had a simple AGI stat to sum everything up.

He'd have to find a way to figure that out too, later. Hopefully in a place where he actually had some room to move around, though.

* * *

The ability to see through anything he had equipped that would otherwise cover his face. The ability to see wind direction while having Hide active. A small resistance to outside lights from deactivating his camouflage. A small decrease to the sound he made while moving around.

These were all passive abilities he had unlocked without warning, just by experimenting randomly. There were a few others along those lines as well. There were a lot of explanations and abilities hidden deep inside his skill guide now that really all could be summed up quite simply by: ' _My character is pretty sneaky now, and good at hiding.'_

He was going to need to try experimenting with his Mixing skill as well. It was maxed, but he still had basically no information about how to use it. He knew 2 potion recipes, basically. Both of which were pretty limited and useless. He still had to learn how to make Health potions and the other useful stuff. But the game wouldn't give him any answers or hints. He'd have to randomly mix some stuff together and see what happened.

* * *

Kirito had unlocked these abilities only after he had equipped his cloak. This meant that some abilities were dependent on items. Were there any more abilities like that? He wanted to find out.

Kirito had a lot of items in his inventory now, but he figured that he should probably go through each item one by one to see if anything else showed up. So he opened his inventory and started equipping items one at a time.

The process was annoying and long. At first, he had thought that he could quickly blaze through his entire inventory rapidly, and then just check back to his Hiding skill guide a single time at the very end after he had finished. If the skill guide updated after all the requirements came together then surely it wouldn't matter if he only happened to be carrying said requirements for a second or two before they went back into his inventory. Then he'd just read up on any unlocked abilities at the end.

But it didn't work like that. That would've been too easy, apparently. The descriptions only updated after any new abilities were activated for the first time. But since abilities vanished from the menu when the requirements weren't currently all available, there was a chance that he would miss any hidden abilities by doing that.

So during this whole process, he had to first pull out an item, then check his Hiding menu to see if anything new was there each time before switching to the next item, then repeat the process.

But he was ultimately glad that he had gone through this tedious work.

A text box had shown up after pulling out a dagger. The new ability had no visible name or explanation, just a simple text box saying:

_Unlock Ability?_

_Yes/No._

It was obvious what option he picked. Then he navigated back to his skill descriptions to try to figure out what the ability did.

* * *

Every player had access to a hotbar. It contained 10 slots that could be hotkeyed with an action or item. By default, this was disabled, but pretty much every single person from the beta had learned how to enable it. You couldn't really fight on the front lines without such a convenient setting, so it was pretty much mandatory if you wanted to do any high level bossing, or PVP.

Since SAO wasn't an MMO that was played behind a keyboard however, the hotkey system actually used gestures instead of buttons. There were 10 default ones, but a player could overwrite them with new ones if they wanted. Kirito stuck with the default ones himself, though, and had gotten used to them.

They were activated with subtle finger and hand movements. But to prevent any accidental activations during combat, a final confirmation was needed by the system which required a mental nudge.

The NerveGear read your brainwaves precisely enough that it knew when you were 'willing' something to happen. So you had to do that to get the hotkey to work in addition to the gesture. It took some getting used to, but the idea was straightforward.

Things were made a lot easier by the fact that the gestures did not have to be super precise when a player executed them, as well. As long as they were close enough, it worked.

Each hotkey mapped to an action of some sort from a list, and you could freely choose how to arrange your hotbar using them. Equipping items, putting them away, dropping them, activating item effects, there were a ton of possibilities. There were even some dual purpose conditional actions. Like a single hotkey that equips an item if it is in the inventory, and that de-quips it if it's in your hand, for example.

As a result of the ease that was involved with the activation of these hotkeys, players could activate them with incredible subtlety. Kirito could easily activate any of his hotkeys without anyone directly observing him even noticing. They would only notice the effects of them unless he created new hotkey gestures that were more visible, which was typically a pretty stupid idea in Kirito's opinion, but some players did it anyways to make themselves look cool.

None of this involved the use of a skill. All players had access to these systems at all times.

The set of these 10 hotkeys was known as the hotbar, and all players had a toggle that would show it in their heads up display if they wanted it to. In their vision, just below their health bar, if the toggle was on, each of the 10 hotkeys would be visible to the player, along with an image representing whatever item or action that was assigned to each one.

Kirito's new ability, however, expanded on this system. It was called Hidden items. He could store stuff in his cloak now. Small weapons and items in particular could be hidden in the sleeves of certain articles of clothing, which was why the ability had revealed itself only after pulling out a dagger, something small enough to fit. These items could be drawn and retracted nearly instantly with the flick of a wrist.

This changed everything. They weren't stored in his hotbar. The hidden items were stored in the piece of clothing he was concealing them inside, not in his inventory. Which meant that he did not have to waste hotkey slots on them.

The applications of this were nearly endless. He was very likely the only person that could do this now, as well. It was almost like a unique skill simply because of the fact that it was still way too early in the game to expect other players to have maxed out Hiding yet.

If he could figure out how to use this ability with multiple different cloaks, each containing different items, and switch between them during combat, he could free up a ton of valuable slots on his hotbar.

* * *

Kirito's mind was still reeling from all of the new implications of this ability. He went through his menu and dedicated his first hotkey slot to equipping and removing his one and only cloak. Inside that cloak, he had decided that he would conceal a rare dagger that he had picked up a long time ago in his sleeve, and use it as an offhand weapon.

He had practiced using a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other while fighting every now and then, and it had taken some getting used to, but it did work. He could move a little bit faster with the decreased weight he had to carry around, but he could not activate any dagger specific sword skills with it, because he didn't have the Dagger skill selected in his skill slots. He could use one handed sword skills with it, though, as a dagger technically did count as one. It just wasn't very good at it when used as a substitute. But it worked, and it allowed him to dual wield with some subtlety. So if he were ever attacked, he could use a single sword to defend himself at first, and quickly draw his dagger whenever he needed something extra, concealing it again immediately after. With this new ability, that dagger suddenly gained a lot of value.

There was one thing that he had to be careful about with this new ability, though. He had to be careful when switching weapons. If he wanted his dagger in his offhand weapon slot, he'd have to put the cloak on first, then activate the gesture to equip it.

But then if he wanted a sword to be in that offhand slot next, for some reason, replacing that dagger he had just equipped, he would have to put the dagger away in his cloak manually first.

If instead, he simply activated the gesture to equip an offhand sword while he was still holding that dagger, the system would throw that dagger into his inventory upon equipping the new weapon. It would not automatically know to put it back into his cloak, which could mess up all his weapon switches if he wasn't careful.

He wouldn't have it in his cloak if he messed up like that even once during a fight, and then he couldn't switch back to it until he fished it out of his inventory and hid it in his cloak again. Which took time. Time that he wouldn't have in combat. The same thing applied with potions, and any other important small item that he was using his cloak to have quick access to.

So it added this new layer to his fighting style. If he wanted to use his cloak for convenient weapon switches and to extend his hotbar, he had to carefully put items he wanted to store away, or else face the risk of having them end up in the wrong spot, and becoming inaccessible until he dug through his inventory to reset everything.

Messing up his hotkey rotations could really set him back, and there were a ton of ways to do that. It mattered now, which order he activated things in. Something that wasn't the case before discovering this ability.

But if he was really careful and learned how to abuse this mechanic to the fullest extent, there were a ton of applications. The most promising of which involved weapon switches.

Very few players had hybrid combat styles, where they used more than one main weapon. Almost everyone stuck to a single one. It was really only the most elite players with a true understanding of monster weaknesses that did it. But even then, in almost all cases, it was just better to make a party where one of the members used the weapon you were wanting to switch to as their main weapon.

There had really only been one occasion where Kirito had actually needed to do a weapon switch himself. Back in the beta, he had needed to pull out a shield to stop a miniboss's special attack that couldn't be avoided by any other means. It had also been a race at the time, where finding a party with a shield user would have taken too long. All of his competitors, that same group of elite players that always competed with him to be the first to defeat various bosses, had been trying to rapidly form a party when that boss had been discovered, and Kirito, seeing the opportunity, had gone off on his own and had gotten there first. Finding a shield user would have taken too long, so he had soloed the boss himself, using a trashy shield that he hadn't been able to sell off at the time.

But other than edge cases like those, switching weapons was really only useful when you were a solo player who couldn't find a party. Which almost made it uniquely applicable for someone in Kirito's situation.

If he ended up soloing floor bosses then he'd definitely need to do this. He'd probably be tribridding, using three or more different primary weapons. It was simply unavoidable.

He really wasn't comfortable at the moment using anything other than his swords, but there were certain skills that other weapons provided that simply couldn't be replicated with them. There were important tank abilities that only shields provided, long range abilities that polearms were perfect for, and crushing abilities that maces and warhammers were needed for, and some of the bosses that these abilities were useful for could not be defeated unless those abilities were present in the party attacking it. So he'd need to unlock those abilities himself if he wanted to ever solo them, but he really wasn't too sure how he'd manage that at the moment.

It would take up so many skill slots. Everyone started with two of them. The third was unlocked at level 6, the fourth at level 12, the fifth at 20, and then a new one every 10 levels after that.

He was level 16 at the moment, and had 4 skill slots. One handed sword, Mixing, Hiding, and Acrobatics.

Having tank abilities unlocked would be extremely useful, but that required the skill called Shield. If he ever wanted to last for long durations in combat against a boss, he'd need some of those damage reflection and nullification abilities that that skill provided as well, or else he'd end up needing way too many health potions. He'd have to make use of those abilities in a weird way.

Typically, Shield was a skill used exclusively by Tanks, players that were specialized builds meant for attracting the boss's attention and 'tanking' the damage while the players more oriented for DPS attacked the boss from behind, or from the flanks.

But in order to do that, Tanks would need heavy amounts of armour, typically needing the Extended Weight Limit skill as well, which made them so unbelievably slow.

Kirito would need his speed to remain high and yet still have those abilities. He was pretty sure he could do it theoretically, he had an idea for it anyways, but it would be so hard to pull off.

He'd basically need armour switches on his hotbar, making use of his newly freed up slots from his new item concealing ability. He'd be equipping whatever shield or piece of equipment he needed for only the brief instant that it was required, and then de-quipping it immediately afterwards so he could move around again.

How heavy the equipment a player had currently equipped, was what determined how much the player's speed was lowered when wearing or holding it, but if that equipment was in the inventory, it didn't count for that weight. So by rapidly switching like that, he'd only be slowed down in those moments of time where he was actually wearing it. This bypassed his need for the Extended Weight Limit skill, which allowed a player to not be slowed down as much while wearing heavy armour. He could simply decide to not take up that skill and accept the fact that he couldn't move for those instants of time and simply de-quip everything when he wanted to move around again.

But while that bypassed one of the skills he would have otherwise needed, he still needed more. However, since he was already so over-leveled for the floor, the only way he could realistically get the levels he needed was by fighting bosses.

There was an opportunity in the near future that would not ever show up again. A window that if he made it through, would make him the strongest in the game without a doubt, and would put him on the path to getting all of those extra slots. That window was the fact that they were all on the first floor.

The way that SAO was designed was that floor bosses increased in difficulty as you reached higher floors, which meant that since they were on the first floor at the moment, there would be no other time where the current floor boss would be this easy to beat.

This was doubly so, since Kayaba would have probably anticipated the hesitance that the players were demonstrating at the moment, and would want to make that first boss as easy as possible to encourage everyone that his game was winnable.

But the true window of opportunity was that the boss gave out a fixed amount of experience upon its death, and that xp was then split up and shared amongst all players who had taken part in defeating it. The fewer players there were, the more experience each of them would get.

But what if he soloed it? Then he'd get all of that experience for himself.

Floor bosses were typically designed to be taken down by a raid party, which usually consisted of 7 parties of 6 players. That was the average anyways. So he'd get the combined experience meant for 42 players if he soloed the boss himself.

Since it was almost guaranteed that every member of a raid party would level up upon defeating a floor boss, just how many times would Kirito level up if he were alone? Five levels? Maybe as many as 10? It would put him on a new height of strength, and would make it completely useless to ever grind again, essentially.

If he were over leveled now, then after soloing a floor boss, even the weakest one of them all on the first floor, he would be way too powerful for anything on the second floor, or on the third, or the fourth. He probably wouldn't see another challenge until floor 10 at least, if he pulled off.

But most importantly, getting all of that experience and strength on the first floor, would open him up to the possibility of soloing the second floor boss, and so on. That's what he meant by this being a brief window of opportunity. If he didn't solo a floor boss by the third or fourth floor, they would start getting too difficult to ever have the chance to try again, and that window would close forever.

But if he did it before then, then his level would be high enough to solo even more bosses later on, and it would also free up a huge portion of his time.

When you were over-leveled to such a degree that it was totally pointless to even try and grind anymore, those hours you would have spent training, were now open to doing other things.

He would be the strongest player, and wouldn't have to grind any more to stay on top. He could just focus on gathering the supplies and abilities needed to solo the next boss, and he could keep doing that over and over until the game's difficulty finally scaled to the point at which it was no longer possible for him, or any player, no matter how strong, to solo the bosses anymore.

But it all depended on getting off the ground first. He had to get that first huge lump of experience from soloing a floor boss, and there was no better time than the first floor, especially since he still had Illfang's attack patterns memorized from the beta test.

He had been there when the beta testers had taken it down that day, and he knew what to expect.

But it would be difficult. Probably the hardest boss fight he had ever done. Since floor bosses were designed to be taken down by 42 players, they could handle a lot of damage, and worse yet, they would heal a huge amount due to their passive regeneration. If he couldn't damage them faster than they healed, then he'd never win. It would really turn into a numbers game in that respect.

He'd also need a lot of consumables. Health potions in particular. He'd probably need to bring over a thousand of them for the fight. It could easily take 8 hours to finish it off when going solo even when considering his current strength. He'd easily be investing millions of cor into his attempt if he made one.

To even stand a chance, he would need to become incredibly versatile as a player in terms of combat. Far more so than any player had probably ever managed in the game's entire history so far. He couldn't stay in his comfort zone forever and would have to branch out, learning how to use new weapons and abilities. With them, rather than taking the conventional brute force route that a typical raid party took when taking down a boss, where everyone just piled onto it using their numbers, Kirito would have to take the alternate approach. The route that only the absolute pinnacle of players, the elite of the elite, had the skill to take. The route that involved taking advantage of mechanics and weapon switches in a clever way that had likely not even been anticipated by the boss's creators.

Using the boss's stray attacks to take out its own minions, trapping it behind a pillar in such a way that it couldn't get around it to attack you, switching weapons and shields to outright change your entire role in the party from a tank to a DPS in the middle of a fight. Advanced tactics that took incredibly precise timing that was not expected of players at such an early floor, and such that early floor bosses were essentially helpless against as a result.

It was possible to substitute quantity of players for sheer skill. Possible to substitute even as many as 30 other players in the raid party, for just being really, really good at the game.

Parties that were advanced enough to do these sorts of things were so much fun to be in. Parties that were so skilled that actually defeating the boss was mostly secondary. Instead they would often turn the whole affair into one giant challenge. Sometimes they would see if they could do the whole fight with no armour on, or without healing items of any kind. Or with really low quality weapons.

Kirito had actually had a permanent place in one of these types of parties back in the beta. He had been deemed skilled enough by the other members after soloing a particularly difficult miniboss to be offered the position, and he had taken them up on the offer.

They had rarely ever assembled all of their members at once, but on those occasions when they had, the stuff that they had been capable of had been absurd. Even some of the admins of the old beta server had been floored.

Kayaba hadn't been alone back before turning this whole game into a giant hostage situation, he had only been the Development Director of the game. He had been the leader of a massive team of game developers that had all likely been taken by complete surprise at Kayaba's hostile takeover.

But back then, during the beta, Kirito's nameless party had become so skilled that they had become one of the developers' unofficial measuring sticks for their new content. These devs would think to themselves: ' _We need to test this new boss. Get that insane group of players to fight it.'_ Then they would.

That tank that his party had, in particular, was ridiculous. During some of the boss fights, just to see if he could, that man had gone into the fight with only a shield. No weapons, armour, or any other items of any kind. He had wanted to see if he could manage a literal perfect defence with just that, and nullify or deflect every bit of damage sent his way… and he had pulled it off.

Together, they had all been like an elite special forces team that would assemble whenever one of the developers wanted to introduce a new boss, and they had been so skilled that everyone else would just sit back and watch.

Nobody had wanted to ruin it, and would not only sit back and watch as the six of them pulled off what an entire raid party couldn't, but their attempts at bosses would often be prioritized, where other players lined up to take on that same boss would let them through to the front of the line, just so they could watch the fight.

The sixth floor boss had been the only boss taken down by a single party of six in the game's history so far, because of them. It had taken 14 attempts, a couple of days straight of trial and error, and that final fight had itself taken 4 hours, but they had succeeded in the end with just the 6 of them.

Everyone had said it was impossible, but in that moment, they had truly immortalized themselves as the best party in the game in front of thousands of people. Players, game developers, and even those that had watched that final live stream across the internet.

Those had been the good old days.

The one thing each of them had had in common, the players with a permanent spot anyways, was that they had all had established reputations on their own as unbelievably strong players individually before ever assembling.

Kirito really hoped that those guys were all still alive. Or better yet, he hoped that they hadn't even signed on at all on the first day. He hadn't gotten any friend requests from any of them yet either way so he couldn't be sure. The only people who had sent him a friend request were Argo, and a bunch of random people he had never heard of. Likely people who knew of some of his exploits in the beta test, or had heard of his name from somewhere. But he had ignored them all, and they had eventually stopped trying. Everyone but Argo had anyways.

He could honestly say that those times back then when his old party had all gathered together had been the best times of his gaming life so far. They had been unstoppable. None of them had truly known each other either, and there had been no strings attached. All of them had been solo players, and they had all understood that despite working together so well, that didn't mean they had to regularly contact each other, or even add each other as friends.

They had all understood that they would all just assemble, get the job done, and go their own ways.

Which had suited him just fine.

But he had learned so much about the game from those battles. He truly knew how those other party roles worked now. He had seen what a master Tank looked like, because he had fought alongside one back then, and he was fairly confident that he could replicate some of the advanced tactics he had seen the man do with some practice.

He was fairly sure that with all of his experience, taking on floor bosses should be at least theoretically possible to do solo. He would just have to turn his own character into a speed tank. A role that didn't technically exist, but that his old party's tank did all the time. That man had invented the role. Someone meant to tank all the damage without any loss in speed by manually switching heavy armour out as the fight was going on.

It involved standing on a metaphorical razor edge, where one mistake in switching at the wrong time meant instant death for the whole party. Where there was no room at all for errors.

It took up too many hotbar slots having all of these switches on the hotbar like that and it often sacrificed the ability to store potions, making it impossible to heal yourself. But his party had managed it because they had one of their members as a dedicated potion runner, another role that they had invented, who literally spent most of the fight tossing out all types of potions to the people who needed them, and carefully keeping track of when everyone's potion effects would expire so he could allocate new ones to the people that needed them. This spared everyone else's slots, and gave their tank room on his bar to experiment with all of those armour and weapon switches.

Kirito needed to be able to do that. To do those types of switches. To be a speed tank. But more than that, he needed to perform that role, while also being a DPSer, which was what his specialty had always been. Dealing damage as quickly as possible while the tank drew the boss's attention.

He needed to do both of those roles at once somehow, by switching out his armour and weapons.

Normally, that couldn't even be done with just 10 hotkey slots, which was the main reason why their elite party had never even tried merging roles like that before. But with this new weapon concealing ability, where all of his health potions, teleport crystals, anti-poisons, STR and AGI boosting potions, anti-paralysis potions, and everything of the like, all of his small items, could all be essentially stored in a single hotbar slot in his cloak, he now had potentially 9 other slots to work with now.

He did need to get a better cloak for that first, but he intended to get one as soon as he could.

A full armour switch typically took up 5 slots if you included a helmet of some kind. A shield made six, but that only left four other slots for everything else, which made it impossible to include everything important if you were trying to do a complete switch like that under normal conditions. This specific ability of his had been the missing link that his old party's tank had been missing.

' _What could that man have done if he had had this ability back then?'_ Kirito wondered.

He would have turned into an absolute monster. But now, Kirito needed to turn into that himself. He wouldn't just be a speed tank, he'd be a speed tank DPSer. With his spins thrown in, he could turn into something unbelievable in the future. Someone truly worthy of that permanent position in his old party.

He just needed to practice everything. He needed to get all of those switches mastered, and at some point, he needed the Shield skill, and an actual shield for that matter. His buckler, the one he had picked up from that player in the forest, wasn't anywhere near good enough.

He'd also need to make it to level 20 to get his next slot. Which probably wouldn't happen until he took out a floor boss first. So he'd probably have to find a way to beat Illfang without using a shield at all.

* * *

No other abilities had revealed themselves after going through the rest of his inventory.

Kirito finally stood up after confirming his hotbar setup, and after confirming that his dagger was in his cloak.

He was ready to return.

There may be a way for him to buy and sell things now, because of his new abilities.

It would be inconvenient, and he'd be overpaying because he had to go through a middle man, but he had come up with the idea after trying to think of ways to get the information he needed out of Argo without actually needing to see her face to face.

He could pay someone to do that for him, he had realized. In the same fashion, he might also be able to pay someone to buy and sell items for him. As long as he paid the right amount of cor, that is.

But he had a lot of cor on him, and a lot of additional wealth stocked up in rare drops that he was incapable of using himself. He would even be able to collect Nepenthe ovules from near his cave en-masse, and sell them off at rare item prices for even more cor. Nobody else in the game would know that the item was so easy to get for him, so he could get a lot of money that way because he would have no competition.

Not that he needed any more money really, but it was nice to see the stack of 3,000,000 cor in his inventory, and having more could only help if he had to keep paying middle men to get things for him in the future.

Three million cor was more than he had any right to have on such an early floor. If he had grinded monsters normally, he'd probably only have a few hundred thousand by now, if that.

So he was probably one of the richest players in the game. He could probably also make a fortune by selling off Nepenthe ovules. He'd undercut whatever the going rate was, and make sure that as many people as possible got their hands on that Anneal Blade.

It was a bit of a win-win scenario, there.

The real price of that ovule, what it should be selling at anyways, was a lot less than what he expected it to be actually selling for right now. It was massively over-inflated, and he could take advantage of that.

He _would_ take advantage of that. Now that he had thought through all of this, however, and realized that he might have a way to buy and sell items, he was really starting to regret burning through his old Anneal Blade completely. He might have been able to upgrade it if he hadn't, if he could have gotten another player to do it for him.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**psychominer, Gabriella Gadfly**


	9. The Mistake

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito hadn't been sure what to expect when he finally reached the forests near Horunka again.

But what he had seen didn't really surprise him.

A party of players fighting the Little Nepenthes, likely competing with dozens of other parties for an ovule.

He could see three parties just in this spawn area alone. All of whom were competing for individual Little Nepenthes.

Since there were so many people in the area, they were able to kill all of the monsters faster than they could spawn into the game. This forced everyone to wait around for long periods and compete with each other for kills.

They had capped out the spawn rate of the area.

If he had been forced to train like this, he'd have gone mad. It was so slow and inefficient in comparison to his own method of training. And these were the little Nepenthes, not even the normal sized ones he had been fighting himself, recently.

Kirito jumped down off his tree and landed on the ground.

He had climbed up to the canopy earlier when he had heard voices on his approach to the area. And then he had hopped from branch to branch to get to the tree he had just jumped from to get a closer look.

This was the closest he had come to another player in a long time, he realized, and it made him a little nervous.

His fingers were twitching, itching to activate his weapon hotkeys if things went wrong.

In theory, his Hide ability was effective enough to ensure that nobody could see him. But being so close to other people after so long was really unnerving.

He made sure to stick to the shadows just in case, but he was pretty sure that he could walk right in between these players and not be noticed at all with his overpowered camouflage activated.

It was dark out, after all, which enhanced the effectiveness of his Hide ability significantly. This raised the threshold on the amount of 'damage' that needed to be dealt to his Hide Rate bar to disable it even further.

Though, there was still a little bit of lingering unease in the back of his mind, raising doubts as to whether the players could see him or not.

Was he really invisible? What if he wasn't and these players found him? He had never actually tested out this ability on a real player before even though he had seen others use it in the past.

Was he using the ability correctly? He hadn't had someone teach him how to make use of it properly, and he had learned everything about it by reading his skill guide and by remembering what players had done in the beta test.

These lingering paranoid thoughts put him on edge, even when the rational part of him understood that there was no way that they could spot him unless he did something stupid. Something like running into the middle of their group, unannounced, and screaming his head off.

It'd probably scare the piss out of them if he did that, he mused. No doubt. But his Hide ability, while overpowered, would cancel immediately if he made that much noise so close to them and they would immediately find him.

But either way, he just wanted to get out of the area as soon as possible… He was way too close to other people for his liking.

As he continued walking away silently in the shadows of the trees, he overheard the conversation of a few of the players nearby.

"Come on," one of them started complaining. "When is this thing going to drop?"

"Oh, stop complaining," a player from a different party replied. "This is the third day we've been out here, and none of us have gotten it yet."

"Seriously?!" Another player questioned. "This is your third day?"

"Yeah."

"Man, that sucks."

"I hate this quest so much."

Kirito felt a small grin form on his face despite the situation as he continued on, their voices getting quieter and quieter as he walked further away from them in his bubble of invisibility.

He was so glad that he'd rushed that quest on the first day. He did not want to be in their position right now. Still not having the Anneal Blade after almost a month of gameplay? That was just ridiculous.

He took a deep breath and sighed, trying to shake off the lingering tension in his body.

They hadn't even looked his way. The camouflage worked after all.

He had needed to pass by an area in the direct field of view of a couple of those players, and he hadn't been spotted.

But despite that, he couldn't completely clear the tension no matter what he did. His body still felt like it had this electric pulse going through it, keeping all of his muscles on high alert. Like a spring, ready to go off in an instant.

But it was okay now, he decided. He hadn't been seen, and he could make it back to Horunka now without any more problems.

This had even been a sort of field test too. His ability worked exactly as his skill guide had said it would, and he wouldn't have to worry about it failing anymore. At least, it worked in a forest at night.

His next challenge was seeing if he could do the same thing in a moderately crowded village.

Then suddenly, it happened.

An instant before it did however, Kirito had gotten an abrupt stomach lurching feeling.

After seeing these players competing over the Nepenthes, he had thought back on how many ovules he had gotten over the past few weeks, and then his thoughts had carried on to the number of fruited Nepenthes he had had to kill.

And shortly after, he had thought about Nepenthe escape velocity, and how him being at any Nepenthe spawn point practically guaranteed that both an ovule, and an exploding fruit would immediately spawn into the game.

Then he had recognized that yes, in fact, he was at a Nepenthe spawn point at the moment. He was hidden, sure, but Hiding didn't affect the spawn rates of monsters as far as he was aware.

The game knew he was there, even if he was hidden. It would spawn Nepenthes even if those Nepenthes couldn't find him at all.

Because he was there.

He had been hit by the lurching feeling that he may have just unintentionally MPKed those players simply by being in the area, hidden or not, and he had glanced back towards them with a really bad feeling in his stomach.

The next wave of Nepenthes had immediately spawned in before his eyes... and just as he had feared, five of them carried the exploding fruit, while another three had the ovule.

Kirito's eyes immediately widened, and he watched the next string of events unfold in slow motion.

"Finally!" One of the players shouted, noticing one of the flowered Nepenthes.

The player wasted no time in attacking it.

He had a small shield in one hand, a sword in the other, and Kirito could clearly see that he was not very skilled with either. Not by his own standards anyway.

And those suspicions were immediately confirmed as the player deflected the vine of the flowered Nepenthe with his shield... straight into the exploding fruit of the next Nepenthe over.

Pop!

Somehow, that player hadn't even seen it.

The fruit burst, and a flood of cursors instantly appeared from all directions.

For a brief moment, Kirito figured that things couldn't get any worse.

But that moment passed almost immediately.

Because of course, things could get worse.

'Dammit…'

All of sudden, and to his annoyance, Kirito noticed that the new Nepenthes spawning into the game due to the fruit were also affected by his being there.

They had all been affected by Kirito's increased special Nepenthe spawn rate from all of his grinding.

One in three, were either fruited, or flowered.

Because he had reached Nepenthe escape velocity.

He heard the panicked cries of the players in front of him, and with the realization that he may have just inadvertently killed them all by just passing through the area, he decided that he needed to step in or they were all going to die.

* * *

"What the hell happened! Where did all these things come from!" Kirito heard someone shout.

Another fruit exploded, followed immediately by another.

"Group up now! We need to break through before we get surrounded! We need to get back to the village!" The party leader shouted.

"You!" The same man pointed to the terrified leader of the other party of players next to him. "Get your party together, and help us break out! We need to work together!"

The terrified man nodded his head and commanded his party.

"Merge parties! We need to bust out!"

The Nepenthe swarm arrived just as the two parties formed together, and the battle began.

With one glance at the situation, Kirito knew that they wouldn't make it out on their own... but they'd last longer than the isolated third party would.

Two of the parties had been right next to each other when the first fruit had burst, so they had been able to merge together. But the third had been too far away to do the same, so Kirito had been able to immediately determine that that third party would be wiped out much faster than the other two parties would.

They all clearly lacked experience on being totally overwhelmed by large numbers of enemies, but at least two of the three parties were close enough to be able to work together.

Kirito made an instant decision to try and reconnect them all.

His first goal was to clear a path between the two groups so that all three parties could merge together.

Then he would clear a path for all of the players to get out.

He alone was far better equipped to deal with this situation than all 18 other party members here were, combined.

'So much for staying anonymous,' he immediately lamented.

The battle raged on for about 15 seconds before Kirito was finally close enough to intervene.

In that span of 15 seconds, the isolated party had been completely surrounded, and was only a few moments away from being totally wiped out.

They weren't trying to focus on punching a hole in the line and escaping and were instead, idiotically, fighting the Nepenthes on all sides in a circular formation.

They were completely surrounded now.

Kirito's heart was pounding in his ears as he analyzed what route he was going to take to kill the most Nepenthes in the least amount of time.

He found a decent path, and his fingers twitched, activating the hotkeys to equip his weapons.

His camouflage deactivated. Though he still had his hooded cloak up, with the 'face blackening' ability, and the 'hood sticking' ability active.

His cursor was also hidden.

Kirito had been able to confirm all of this in the span of a heartbeat with a quick glance at his interface.

Satisfied with the protections that he had up, he focused on the battle once again.

His feet left the ground.

He leaped into the air, initiated a spin, and hoped that the other two parties would survive long enough for him to reach them.

* * *

'Huh', Kirito thought lamely, as he entered the fight.

It seemed that in serious situations whenever he had to go all out, he routinely exceeded his former limitations.

It had been in a moment like this on that first day of the game that the concept of running literal circles around groups of monsters had proven itself invaluable.

By having so little space to work with at that time, he had been forced to either find a way to use it all as efficiently as possible, or die.

In that encounter, he had discovered that by controlling his speed, by deliberately not sprinting, by going just slightly faster than his enemies, he could make use of the space he had in an entirely new way, and he could radically extend the amount of time it took for a pool of monsters to completely surround him.

He would do these sort of... feint attacks, where he would jump just into range of the line of Nepenthes, and then immediately jump out of it without attacking to induce a delay.

The Nepenthes couldn't attack while moving very well, and so by doing that, the line would stop for a moment so it could try and attack him. Their vines would swing out at the spot he had just been at, but by the time they arrived he would already be long gone.

And then the front line would start moving again.

But the front line had stopped for that moment, which made the second line just behind them stop as well. And the third, and so on. It would cause this... _wave_ of delay to go through the entire group of them, slowing the whole horde down collectively.

All because of that little, half-second feint attack.

It would slow down the rate at which the area he could run loops in reduced in size by a huge margin. This would extend the amount of time he had before he would die from being surrounded.

And the thing was, all of these pieces had just fallen into place at the time. He had been forced to invent these new concepts that nobody, not even the most elite of players that he had used to hang around with, had even dreamed of.

Those players would not be able to comprehend that a single person could effectively fight that many opponents at once by doing that.

He had thought that way at the time himself, as well. It wasn't supposed to be possible to buy that much time while being surrounded by a swarm of that size.

And then his body had just done all of that on instinct. He hadn't even thought about it. He had been forced to adapt or die, and he hadn't realized until he had finally escaped the area and everything had calmed down, just what it was that he had done.

He had analyzed that fight as objectively as he could afterwards, to try and figure out why he had been able to walk out of it alive, and he was still learning lessons from it weeks later.

And those lessons had served as the basis for that original insight that had led him down the path to his spins.

In those moments where everything was on the line, he would learn so much about how to fight more effectively.

Maybe it was because the rules of engagement that his conscious mind thought were ironclad just left the forefront of his mind in high stress situations, or maybe he was just good at working under pressure… he didn't know.

But whatever it was, it had happened again.

That first spin of his had taken out eight Nepenthes. His new record.

Sharp Nail for three, Vertical Arc for two, and then alternating Verticals and Horizontals for the other three, using both of his weapons. All while he was still airborne.

He had never tried to do that before, he had thought that he just didn't have enough time before he would hit the ground to pull off a combo of that length.

But his body had just done it on its own due to the intensity of the current situation, and the convenient positioning of the row of monsters he had just taken out. If he hadn't have done it, some of the players would have died. So he did it without thinking.

He just did it. Impossibility hadn't even crossed his mind. He hadn't even noticed what he was doing until he had already finished the combo, either.

He had been a little concerned earlier. But it seemed that it was unwarranted.

He hadn't actually fought anything for a little while. Not since before his week long Mixing grind anyway. And that had worried him a little, making him think that maybe he had lost his edge.

But he hadn't.

His body had just fallen into the familiar motions of his combat style without delay.

Just like riding a bike.

He hadn't forgotten how to spin properly, and he hadn't gotten any weaker since the day he stopped training a little over a week ago.

If anything, he was actually better, now.

The world around him blurred as he continued his rapid spin. The sounds of his former enemies' deaths filled the air with the sound of shattering glass.

He hadn't yet decided to pull out his second sword yet, but he was using his dagger, and hiding it in his cloak with that concealing ability whenever he wasn't, in order to minimize the risk of anyone there seeing it.

He didn't know what other people would think if they saw him using two weapons at once, so he would only pull out that second sword and truly go all out if there was no other option.

Then his feet touched the ground.

The instant they did, he immediately chained a second spin at another line of Nepenthes, causing the world to whirl again as he spun at a fantastic pace.

Another five went down with that.

His feet touched the ground again. And again, he chained into another spin.

And then another.

After five spins in total, there was nothing left to fight in his general vicinity, and so he immediately rushed off to help the other two parties, leaving the one he had just saved without another word.

He had cleared an immediate, and extremely obvious path that would force the isolated party into the direction of the other two.

He had probably cleared three quarters of the Nepenthes surrounding that third party to do it too, and it had only taken him about 7 or 8 seconds to pull it off.

Kirito ignored their shouts of surprise at his dramatic, whirlwind entrance, and continued his dash towards the second group of players.

Panicked players would try to run, and they would naturally follow the path of least resistance. In other words, they would see the path he had just created for them, and instinctively run down it before their brains could catch up to what they were doing.

He would trust in their ability to panic and run, to get them where he needed them to go.

That was the plan anyways. If they didn't do that... then he wasn't sure that he would be able to save them.

He could get out of the current situation, no problem. He didn't even consider this situation as threatening to someone like him. But he hadn't ever anticipated a need to actually protect other people before. Because why would an orange player like him ever need to do something like that?

And now that he thought about it, that was something that he wasn't really capable of doing on his own very well at all.

He was good at killing things. That had always been his specialty. Not protecting others.

* * *

It took only a handful of seconds to clear most of the distance to the next group of players.

And he had already started spinning.

He did not think of Nepenthes as individual monsters anymore. He thought of them in terms of geometric shapes.

A line of Nepenthes. An inverted triangle. A ring swarm. A hollow cluster. And there were a whole host of other terms that he had made up along those same lines to make it easier for him to understand how to approach each situation.

There seemed to be a dozen or so 'shapes' along those lines that tended to show up very commonly due to the way the Nepenthe AI had been programmed. And each 'shape' required a slightly different approach, generally, to deal with too.

Which made classifying them all important.

There was a ring of Nepenthes in front of him, surrounding the group of players, and more were coming in from the surrounding forest. Kirito mostly just had to get rid of the build up of Nepenthes that were already there to give the trapped players an opportunity to escape.

They would be able to make it through the gaps in the oncoming wave if they really tried to, then.

He was currently spinning and zig-zagging his way between the scattered Nepenthes on his way to the second group, approaching the ring from the outside.

Just before landing on his final spin before getting in range of the players, as the world spun in his field of view, he planned out the route he would take the instant his feet touched the ground.

He finished his spin and jumped into the air, as high as he could.

Due to the arrangement of the ring, another spin wouldn't have worked. He would have torn straight through and probably would have hit some of the players inside.

The only way his spins worked at all was when he got into the mindset that said something along the lines of: 'I will slam into the enemy line as hard as I can, and they will not slow me down.' The mindset where he thought that he was not attacking the monsters at all, but was instead going through them.

But that was a little problematic when just behind that line of enemies there were a bunch of players that he needed to save.

Using a spin in that situation would have been like… using a rocket launcher to try and stop a hostage situation. Or something.

It was just a bad idea.

Instead, he had needed to strike from above. To get inside the group of trapped players.

But while he was in the air, things got a little more complicated. In a split second, he was able to take in the scene and notice the fact that he had to go in hard.

He had seen their health bars, and one of the players was almost dead.

He needed his second sword, he decided. His dagger worked while spinning, but the reach was too short to be used for hitting multiple targets effectively. It tended to get stuck in whatever he hit, far too often for that.

His swords didn't have that limitation at all. The weight was also a little more balanced when he was using them both and he could spin a little easier.

He made two quick gestures.

The first was the hotkey to store his dagger inside his cloak. One of the gestures that didn't take up a slot on his actual hotbar. He'd have lost access to that dagger if he simply pulled his second sword out, replacing his offhand, as the game would have thrown it into his inventory somewhere where he didn't have a hotkey mapped to it.

And the second gesture was mapped to the action: 'put my backup sword in my offhand slot,' one of the two hotkeys on his bar that was mapped to that backup weapon.

He hoped that the players would be too startled, or that he would be moving too fast, for them to notice that he was using two swords now.

Kirito landed right in the middle of the players and lashed out in all directions with as many spins and sword skills as he could fit into that short span of time.

He had prioritized the enemies around the player that was almost dead, but after dealing with them, he attacked the remaining enemies on all sides of him.

It took him about 5 seconds to clear an opening. Barely any time at all. One solidly executed, close range spin from the inside of the ring had done most of the work.

It almost made him wonder how these things had ever posed a threat to him at all.

A massive gap opened up in the ring.

The sounds of each Nepenthe shattering, since they had died so quickly, had almost merged together into a single, prolonged sound of shattering glass.

After the Nepenthes he had taken out with his first spin had vanished, the remaining enemies had been so close together and had been oriented in just the right way that he had been able to chain three more consecutive spins, back to back, without having to travel on foot after any single one of them.

He could just jump into them, one after the other, the instant that he landed, carrying over most of his remaining rotational momentum each time.

These Nepenthes were like butter under his swords.

When he landed on his feet after completing that third spin, he immediately hid his second sword with another hotkey gesture, and resummoned his dagger, blocking an incoming vine just in time to save a downed player as he did so.

Weirdly, the sound that his dagger made when deflecting that vine was a metallic ping, as if that vine had been made out of steel.

The player he saved with that move, had been knocked off his feet during Kirito's entrance.

Well actually, Kirito had sort of… kicked the guy out of his way and off his feet because he was, well... in the way.

So that he could deal with the Nepenthes more easily. But in any case, the player had been on the ground afterwards, and he was about to be attacked, so Kirito had needed to block the strike since he had been the person that put him there in the first place.

And since he wasn't spinning anymore, he had needed to switch out his backup sword for the dagger again to minimize the chances of being noticed using two weapons at once.

His form wasn't blurry anymore from his rapid spin, so he probably couldn't get away with using a second sword.

Kirito activated another quick series of skills to clear a few more Nepenthes that had piled up.

A Sharp Nail. A Vertical Arc. Two Horizontals and a Slant. And then he front kicked the last Nepenthe into an oncoming group of others, sending them all tumbling to the ground in a heap.

"What the hell?!" one of the players shouted..

"Move," Kirito demanded.

He had this urge now to go as fast as he could. And not even because these people were in immediate danger and he needed to save them.

He needed to get out of there, now. Every second he spent in the area was another one where he risked his identity.

He still wanted to get out of this without being exposed. That meant minimal conversation, and getting out of the area as fast as possible. The quicker he could get these people out of danger, the quicker he could ditch them all to prevent them from asking any nosy questions.

Another group of Nepenthes showed up in front of them, and Kirito sprinted full speed directly into the middle of them, leaping into the fray without hesitation.

Once again, Kirito had only cleared out most of the Nepenthes surrounding those two parties of players. He couldn't quite kill all of them as some had been just out of his range. However, he could once again use those leftover enemies to push these players where he wanted them to go.

He had cleared a path, and that path was the only free one. Which meant that if they had any sense at all, they would all follow him down it.

Thankfully they did get the message, as one of the members of the party immediately grabbed the downed player he had saved by his arm, and dragged him to his feet.

The man was also clear headed enough to start giving commands.

"There's an opening! We're leaving through it now! So move!"

"I'll cover you," Kirito stated calmly, as he finished dealing with the last of the newest group of enemies and started running with the players he had just saved. "Whatever you do, don't stop running."

Then Kirito was off again, keeping the line in front of them clear, and making sure that the members of the formerly isolated third party stayed nearby.

He hadn't been able to pay attention to them while he was saving the other two parties, but he was able to take a quick glance their way now.

They were running along the same path that he had just cleared for the other two parties, but they were still behind by a few dozen meters or so. It would seem that he would have to keep a very close eye on them to make sure they didn't fall behind any further.

He was only one person. He couldn't make two different paths for both groups by himself. If they couldn't keep up, they would be left behind, and Kirito doubted he could save them all if that happened.

Another fruit exploded by a stray vine. More friendly fire from another Nepenthe.

Kirito had heard the noise so often, that it barely even registered to him.

The other players however, didn't have that experience.

He heard another round of panicked exclamations from the players just behind him as they continued to try to follow him.

"We're gonna die! We're so going to die!"

"Shut the hell up man! And keep running!"

Another swarm appeared, and Kirito was on them in an instant.

There really were a lot of them.

Kirito was pretty sure that there were more Nepenthe spawn points in the forest around here than there were near his cave. During his training, he never got group sizes this big.

Or maybe the amount that spawned scaled with the number of people in the area. That could actually be what was happening. And since there were so many people nearby...

It didn't matter really though. As these Nepenthes went down with single hits, even with his basic swords.

With another glance behind him, he was able to tell that everyone seemed to be out of danger. They were behind him, following him, and he didn't have to hesitate in his movements any longer. He didn't have to worry about going too fast for them and leaving them behind.

And so he let out a sigh of relief… before accelerating to full speed.

He fell into the rhythm he used to use near his cave. The one he used to maximize kills per hour.

And with that, his mind drifted off as it always did when he was on autopilot grinding Nepenthes, and to him, it felt like he was back in the forest near his cave.

Back in his forest.

All alone, and cutting the grass.

For hours and hours. Every single day.

Weeding.

He ripped through the next line almost instantly, with a sequence of back to back spins.

It was times like these where he was really able to see how far he had come. His DPS was through the roof in comparison to how it used to be. Back in the beta, he wouldn't have even dreamed of being able to move this fast.

There was just this massive energy source in the game that hadn't ever been tapped before. He was the first to do it. Harnessing the speed that the system itself provided when activating sword skills was actually possible. You could translate that speed into the speed of your avatar. It probably hadn't been intended by the developers, but a lot of games seemed to have things like that. Things discovered by the players that could potentially break the game.

Spins changed everything.

This wasn't real life. The laws of physics weren't the same here. There was truly no reason that anyone should fight as if they were.

He could fight so many enemies from so many different directions all at once now.

By capitalising on the differences between the real world and this game world, he could throw off the shackles of his old kendo mindset and create something new.

He could only imagine what his grandfather, or any of his other old, traditional, by the books kendo instructors for that matter, would think if they watched him fight like this.

He actually wondered if it were possible to imitate some of it in real life. If an olympic level gymnast for example, was given a pair of swords in the real world... Could any of these spins actually work? Eleven rotations in one jump was probably too much for anyone in the real world without a trampoline or something, but what about 2 or 3? Would that work? Would it even be practical in a fight or competition?

When he got out of this game, he decided, after getting out of whatever physical therapy he would need to go through after leaving the hospital, he was going to try it with a pair of practice swords. Just to see if it was even doable.

His home did have a practice area that his sister used all the time after all…

He could definitely make use of that.

He'd probably have to make use of it discreetly though. Sugu would be so confused if she saw any of what he wanted to try.

Kirito executed another spin.

These things were so weak that he didn't even have to worry about actually slicing them with his swords or his newly summoned dagger. He could basically just tag them. He could just tap some of these monsters and they would die... as long as he had the velocity from his spins anyways.

Another group appeared, spawning in from the countless fruit explosions happening all around him.

Kirito broke from the rest of the players and dashed into the middle of them.

They barely even slowed him down, and by the time the other players had covered that distance to him, the swarm was already gone entirely.

He continued on, without the other players even needing to slow down.

* * *

"Who is this guy!?"

"What the hell?!"

The enemies weren't even getting close enough for the other players to fight them. And so they started talking to each other. Or shouting, rather.

It made Kirito a little anxious. Not only were they not out of the woods, literally or figuratively, but they were starting to ask questions.

Kirito finished vertically bisecting another Nepenthe. The last one in yet another group.

Due to the distances of the Nepenthe spawn points in the area, when a fruit would go off, it would take a different amount of time for each of the groups from each spawn point to get there. And often, as a result, they wouldn't get there all at once. Coming instead, in lots of small groups that were spaced apart by just a handful of seconds.

Which typically wouldn't be noticed by normal players. If you didn't kill these little groups fast enough, then they pooled up into one giant swarm. But when you did kill them fast enough, as Kirito was doing, and as pretty much nobody else in the game could, there would be brief moments of intense combat, followed by moments of nothing.

Though there were always more on the way…

He had to get out of here already.

"Just how?! How is he doing that?!"

"Are you seriously complaining?! Shut up and keep running!"

The path remained clear, and the players continued moving forwards.

Kirito was the only one fighting. Nobody else needed to. Or could even, if they tried. Everything was dead before any of the players could attack.

Every time a Nepenthe neared them, it was dead before any of them could even draw their weapons.

The danger was pretty much gone by that point.

They were just one grind away from finally making it to the outskirts of Horunka.

* * *

The rest of the battle and retreat had lasted only about five more minutes. And at the end of that time, they were all outside the forest, and they could see Horunka Village in the distance.

While the players he had saved all tried to gather their breath from the sudden surge of adrenaline, and collapsed on the floor, Kirito sort of just stood next to them for a few moments.

Awkwardly in his opinion.

He didn't say a word as they recovered themselves, and he simply took a quick look at their health bars and statuses.

They all seemed okay. Nobody had been poisoned, or paralyzed, or had that damage over time acid effect on them, and everyone seemed, well... okay.

A few had low health, but there weren't any threats in the area and they would be able to heal up. Nobody was in danger of being damaged any more, which meant that everyone, even the people with less than 10% health left, people in the red zone, were safe.

The players even started pulling out their own health potions.

His work was done.

And since he didn't feel very comfortable hanging around a bunch of players he didn't know, he quickly dropped a handful of ovules onto the ground, and relinquished his ownership of them.

And then he activated Hide and sprinted away from them as fast as he could, hugging the treeline the entire way.

He ran for only about twenty seconds or so, but the entire time he was running, he could swear that he was being watched.

His nerves were just on edge from everything that had happened, and it caused him to once again doubt his Hiding skill.

He spun around the trunk of a tree just in case, close enough to the players that he could peer around the trunk to see them, but far enough away that he could get away if they immediately tried to track him down. He leaned back against the tree and held his breath so that even if his Hide somehow deactivated, they still wouldn't see him.

Even with the noise of his frantic footsteps on the grass though from his sprint, his Hiding skill was too overpowered to deactivate.

With his back to the tree, he finally let out another sigh of relief, and tried to catch his breath again. The fight hadn't been very exhausting, but meeting people had been a little scary, he would admit.

He hoped that he wouldn't have to do something like that again.

If he had to meet other players, he would much rather have time to prepare, in advance. To come up with escape plans and the like for if things didn't go his way.

Being thrust into a situation like that had caught him completely flat footed.

After another moment or two of recovering himself, Kirito peered around the tree trunk and noticed the same group of players walking towards the road between Horunka and the Town of Beginnings.

They weren't trying to look for him.

There was a giant field in the area just outside the forest, and the road the players seemed to be heading towards was perpendicular to the direction they were walking in.

They would meet it about 100 meters out, and Kirito assumed that they would then turn left and walk down it towards Horunka Village.

To the left was the village, and to the right was the long and winding road back to the Town of Beginnings way off in the distance. But since it would probably take an hour or so to get there, and Horunka was so close, he figured that that's where they would head to.

In order to avoid walking anywhere near them, Kirito started making his own way towards the village, though he stayed in the forest. Walking along the treeline about 3 trees deep, to avoid any possibility of being spotted from anyone in the field next to him.

He'd enter the village from the west, while the other players seemed to be going towards the southern entrance.

He had gotten 21 ovules in that battle. And he had dropped 18 of them for those players.

He figured that that made them even.

He had gotten them into that mess, and figured that he should give them the ovules as a way to make up for it.

One for each of them.

He kept the rest for himself, though.

The place he needed to get to was on the west side of the village. It was a bar, and he intended to sneak inside it.

All player cursors were hidden inside them, and he would be able to un-hide himself without any suspicion.

Well, without too much suspicion anyways. He'd still be wearing a cloak with a blacked out face, but there were a lot of people that tended to do stuff like that... Minus, the blacked out face part anyways.

That was actually something he hadn't anticipated. Would having his face blackened attract more attention to him, since nobody else has that ability?

Would people look at him and say: 'Wow. That guy clearly has a pretty high Hiding level. Let's tell all our friends about him and shout from the rooftops where we saw him.'

Actually, he wondered… at what level did that ability unlock at?

Kirito quickly manipulated his menu and went into his Hiding skill guide.

There was a skill tree provided of all the unlocks he had managed to 'discover' in the game so far. Not everything was there, as he hadn't 'discovered' everything yet, even though he was maxed, but the stuff that was there had the level requirement needed to activate it displayed right next to it.

The ability was called 'Mask', apparently.

And that ability seemed to have a really low level requirement actually. Only 100.

So basically, any player with at least that high of a Hiding level was able to 'discover' it. And the conditions for 'discovering' it were simple. By putting a cloak on with the required level.

Pretty much anyone could get to that level given the time spent in the game so far, even if they were just casually leveling it up. So Kirito was pretty sure he could get away with using it in a bar full of players. It shouldn't make him stand out too much.

He'd risk it, he decided. Hiding his face was worth any added attention.

He still had work to do at the moment after all, and he might need it.

There was a tradition that had been started in the beta. One that he hoped was still around.

Because that would make his life so much easier if it was.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabrielly Gadfly**


	10. Wild Goose Chase

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

There were a lot of players walking around the village, which came as a bit of surprise at first, considering it was almost midnight, but then again, there were ten thousand players crammed onto the floor…

His Hide ability ensured that nobody even saw his avatar. And even if they had, somehow, he had his robe on, his hood up and it was locked in place. His face was blacked out as well.

He passed by the players on the street while keeping an eye on his hide rate.

Since he'd maxed the skill, he could remain hidden even while on a street with other players. He was literally invisible to these people, and he would be warned of any players attempting to use their Searching skill on him.

Nobody even glanced his way though, and after walking through the streets, he entered the bar in the village.

It was a relatively small bar, one that was attached to an inn. It was possible to rent rooms there if you were a green player, but orange players would be forbidden from doing so.

But he wasn't here for that anyway. He was satisfied with his tent and his cave for the time being.

Instead, he was here to participate in a tradition that had been invented by the beta testers long before the official launch of SAO.

Player quests.

There were occasions where a player would need something done, and wouldn't have the skills to do it themselves, or the network of friends that could.

To solve this problem, and to make it so that players could give jobs to other players as easily as possible, and reward them for doing so, it had been decided that by entering a bar, sitting at a table, buying a specific drink, and leaving it angled on the coaster in a very specific way, you were announcing that you had a job for anyone that was looking for one.

And he happened to have one.

So Kirito deactivated his Hide skill in a dark corner when nobody was looking, revealing his robed form, and took a single step towards an empty table.

But then he immediately froze.

His eyes widened in shock.

An instant later, he reactivated Hide, and stepped back into the corner he had just come from.

He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.

' _Dammit…'_

How could he forget something so simple?

He had almost completely screwed himself over.

He knew that orange players couldn't rent rooms here, and despite that, he was about to try to order a drink.

Why did he think that he could do that? They would probably refuse to serve him in the exact same way that they would refuse to give him a room.

That thought had struck him only a few moments before he attempted to sit down and get a drink from the bartender. It had almost been too late.

He would have completely exposed the fact that he was orange when the NPC he ordered from chewed him out for coming inside in front of everyone in the bar.

But he needed a drink to get the information he needed.

He had glanced around earlier and noticed that a number of people were sitting around and giving jobs to each other using the exact same method that the beta's had developed. Which had proven to him that the tradition was still alive.

He just needed to find a way to participate.

And with those new revelations, he carefully snuck back outside the bar in his invisibility bubble, and stepped into a dark alley just outside.

And then he started to think.

* * *

The problem was the bartender.

He couldn't get a drink from her in all likelihood. There was a chance that he could, but he didn't know for sure. And he couldn't afford to be wrong, either. So he couldn't try, in order to find out.

Maybe if the bar had been empty...

But he really needed to get some information. _That_ was the job he wanted to give. Get someone to talk to Argo and report back to him so he could figure out everything he needed to know.

But he needed that drink first.

There was one way to get one that he briefly considered, but he almost immediately dismissed it. That involved trying to find a player who had bought a drink to-go, and then left without finishing it. Someone with the intention to have it later.

Bars in this world weren't like bars in real life, after all.

In real life, when you walked into a bar or a cafe, you would order a drink, drink it, and then return the glass so it could be washed by the owners and reused.

In this world, the drinks sort of… spawned into the game. Glass and all. And so what players could do, if they wanted to, was take the drink that they ordered, glass included, and just throw it into their inventory and walk out.

That wasn't against any rules, and it wasn't stealing. You paid for the actual, physical glass itself when you bought the drink.

And some players actually did that, as food and drinks maintained their temperature when stored in the inventory.

Some players actually took advantage of that aspect of the game to make a profit. They would go into a bar inside a village, buy a bunch of drinks, place them all into their inventory, and make the long trek inside a dungeon where parties were fighting on the front line. And then they would sell those drinks at a markup.

It wasn't a very good source of income, not by his standards anyway, but it was certainly enough to get by. He had actually paid players a lot of money for doing that for him back in his old bossing days in the beta. Something about having a cold drink available just after finishing off a boss battle was amazing.

Especially when you didn't know that you wanted the drink until it was offered at that moment. And when you hadn't thought to bring one in advance...

But basically, his first idea had been to find one of these players and buy a drink from them, then come back into the bar he had just left.

And he _could_ theoretically do that because of the way that the bar worked.

When you sat down at a table, there were no waiters or waitresses that came around to take people's orders. You had to go up to the counter and order directly from the bartender. And then there were a bunch of empty tables that you could go and sit down at after getting your drink.

But if he walked inside with a drink already, he could sit down at a table and pull it out, and act as if he had ordered it without causing anyone any suspicion.

He would only get kicked out of the building if he directly talked with an NPC inside. One wouldn't come to talk to him if he just sat around at a table. So if he didn't go up to the bartender… he wouldn't get kicked out, and he could still hire someone for his job.

But the problem with this was, he had no idea which players had drinks in their inventory. And also… he couldn't exactly ask.

And even if he somehow found someone with one, he had no way to buy it without drop trading. Which was what merchants did at player markets to both remain anonymous and speed up the actual transaction.

It was the same principle that he had used himself when he had dropped those ovules for those players he had saved an hour or so ago.

You dropped the item you wanted to trade, and relinquished your ownership of it. Doing that prevents it from being possible to summon it back into your inventory from a distance, and it also changes the item description that other players would see when focusing on the item, showing that the item was unclaimed and could be picked up by anyone.

It was a bit faster to do that than opening up a trade window, but players only tended to do this at Player Markets, which were basically trading hubs. It would look really suspicious if he walked up to a player and asked to buy an item from them via drop trade only.

And that was because it was possible to intercept those types of trades. A third player could easily step in to take either the money or the item that was dropped. And that was actually a very common scam.

As a result, this was pretty much only done in markets, where there were a ton of players in the area watching the trades. Anyone who tried intercepting trades there would have a very hard time. Especially considering the fact that there were players who were paid to oversee those types of transactions themselves to make sure there wasn't anything fishy going on. Especially in cases where the item in question was valuable.

Those types of players would build up reputations as being honest third parties, and they would often be paid to serve as mediators.

But in cases where they weren't around, somewhere in the wild for example, drop trading was seen as highly suspicious. As there was seemingly no reason for it.

And since opening an official trade window revealed both his name and cursor colour, he couldn't get his drink that way.

Instead, he would need to do something else.

If he could just get the glass itself…

It didn't even need to be full of any liquid. Just an empty bar glass. He'd be able to work with that...

All of a sudden, an idea came to him.

' _This could actually work…'_

He could go to the stalls.

In the Town of Beginnings, there was an area to train the Thieving skill. It was meant for really low leveled players and provided very poor quality loot and only marginal experience, but essentially, players could steal from certain NPC market stalls.

In order to do it, you needed a certain level in Thieving and a certain level in Hiding. It was a Composition skill training method. Which meant that those two skills could work together in that instance to do something that neither skill could do on their own.

There were guards there after all. The lower your Hiding level, the more often they would see you and attack. And you had to actually steal stuff, so you needed the Thieving skill.

The guards couldn't actually damage you there as it was a safe zone, but if you got caught enough times they would detain you in a cell and you would have to pay a fee to leave. And if you didn't have the money, you would lose some of your experience in the skill instead.

But Kirito had remembered that one of those stalls was a glassblowing stall. One that had potion vials, various flasks, other glassworks, and most importantly, empty bar glasses.

If he could get one of those, then all he would need to do was get the actual drink itself... Which he had another idea for.

Dye.

The specific drink that he needed in order to give a job to someone as per the tradition, was orange juice.

Well… orange dye should work just as well. And it just so happened that he had the Mixing skill and knew exactly how to make orange dye. One of the very few potions he knew how to make from the beta. There was a quest that had needed dye in order to complete. And so he had had to hire someone to make it for him back then and he had observed the process.

And he was pretty sure he could replicate it. The only problem was, _that_ dye had been yellow. He needed orange dye, which would be a little trickier to get the ingredients for. But not impossible.

He knew where to go to find them all. It would just take a bit of time to get there.

So he had his plan, more or less. The outline of one anyways.

There were still a few obvious problems though. The first one being pretty obvious.

He had to go into the Town of Beginnings. The city he had been chased out of on the first day of the game and had almost died in.

However, there was that timer. The reason he had almost died back then was because of the fact that he had been transported to the plaza in that city. The dead center of the whole town. And it had taken him ages to actually make it back to the city gate from there. And in that time, the guard's spawn timer had hit zero, and they had spawned in to attempt to hunt him down.

But if he could be in and out of the town faster than the timer could run out, he would be in the clear.

And that timer had 5 minutes on it.

Kirito knew where the stalls were, and he could make it there and back well within that time. He'd probably have a minute to spare if he sprinted and took the rooftops.

He would have to go at top speed though. But his avatar was pretty fast now. Much faster than it had been on his first day in the game.

He'd probably have to throw his camouflage up as well to prevent any would-be spectators from wondering why some random player was making a mad dash over the rooftops toward the NPC markets, and he'd probably also go at night so that the sound from his footsteps would lower his Hide Rate bar at about the same amount that the nighttime sky increased it, ensuring the camouflage would never deactivate.

And then when he got there, if his mental map and sense of timing was accurate, he'd have about 60 seconds to actually get the glass.

Which of course, was where his next problem would come into play.

He didn't have the Thieving skill. And he also had no way to get it. He refused to lose all progress in one of his other skills just to pick it up too.

But there was a possible workaround there as well.

This training method was both very popular, and meant for very low-leveled players.

When you had low Thieving, and Hiding levels, and wanted to train both skills as fast as possible, until about level 50 or so, stealing from those stalls was a good candidate for the best xp farming method per hour in the entire game.

It wasn't quite as good as the best methods for training either of those two skills separately, but for players who intended to level both of them up eventually, stealing from the stalls was the most efficient in terms of total xp, as the sum total of experience obtained in both skills in one hour doing that was greater than the amount you would gain from 30 minutes of the best Thieving and Hiding training methods, separately.

At least… the best _known_ Hiding methods. It was pretty evident that his own method of training Hiding was _much_ more efficient in the long run than those methods.

But the point was that the total xp gained was greater at the stalls, which made it more efficient for players who wanted to level both skills. And that made it popular. In particular, it was popular at night, as Hide was more effective then.

This lined up their goals quite nicely. Kirito needed it to be night in order for his Hiding skill to be more effective. And so did the people training at those stalls.

So when Kirito got there in the middle of the night, it would probably be peak time, where most of the players using the method would be active in the area.

And the most important part of it all was the fact that they would be noobs.

People who had higher levels in Hiding and Thieving had no need for that method. Past about level 50, there were far better methods that actually earned some significant profit.

Which meant that the people still using that method were either new to those two skills or were just new players in general. People who had only just started playing seriously after finally accepting the truth of the death game.

And if he could find one of these new players in that brief window of time that he was in the city before that guard timer forced him out, he could offer them a massive bag of cash if they would drop trade the bar glass to him.

They wouldn't know about the scam, if they were noobs.

And actually… now that he thought about it a little more clearly, it wouldn't even matter if they did think it was a scam. An empty bar glass was basically worthless, so what would he really even be trying to scam off of them? That's what they should think anyways…

Someone would probably take him up on the offer just to see if he was legit.

The important part about them being new players was actually the fact that they probably wouldn't notice his missing cursor.

But in any case, that was his current plan.

Make a mad dash towards the stalls, find some random nooby player to drop trade him a bar glass, and then make another mad dash to the outskirts of the city.

Then he'd have to go find that flower that could be ground into orange pigment for the dye.

' _Wait... hang on_ ,' Kirito thought, realizing yet another minor mistake in his plan.

Why not just make his own orange juice? Wouldn't that be way simpler than gathering all the ingredients for the dye base and then hunting down that flower?

There was an orange tree on the eastern side of the floor that anyone could pick oranges from. And anyone could squeeze orange juice. No Cooking skill was required for simple tasks like that.

He could literally make his own drink.

He felt a bit like an idiot now. He didn't have to fill his glass with dye to make it look like he had the right drink, he could literally make the right one himself, and it'd be way faster.

' _Yeah. Let's just do that instead,'_ he decided.

* * *

Kirito glanced up at the sky from the inside of the alley he had retreated into after leaving the bar.

It was still dark out.

He quickly opened his menu and checked the time.

2:08 a.m.

He still had time.

He could do it tonight.

If he ran the whole way, he could get to the Town of Beginnings well before 3 o'clock. And then he'd be back in Horunka at around 4:30 if everything went well. That assumed it would take an extra hour to grab the oranges.

With his camouflage active, and his plan in mind, he made his way out of the village.

* * *

As soon as he was out of the village, he began sprinting towards his destination.

He was following the main road. However, since the occasional player showed up walking down it, he was actually running a few dozen meters next to the road rather than right on top of it, to avoid being seen or heard.

Any time he saw a player walking towards him down the path, he slowed right down to a walk to prevent his Hide Rate from getting too low.

It was common for players to use their Searching skill if they happened to have it when traveling between towns to be able to see any monster spawns or other players at a longer distance.

Which meant that if one of these players happened to glance at him with it on, there was a chance, especially if he were sprinting, that they would get that _ping_ sound indicating that they had hovered over something hidden because his Hide Rate was too low.

And he couldn't have that. It would be super annoying getting into a cat and mouse chase all because some nosy and curious player thought they had found something hidden after detecting him like that.

So he always assumed that everyone he passed had that skill active, and he slowed down to a walk each time. Even going as far as beginning to walk away from the path to increase the distance between them as much as possible, on those occasions.

Then when they were out of sight and they had passed each other, Kirito would begin sprinting again at full speed.

It ended up happening to him a few times during his trip.

* * *

He had no major problems reaching the outskirts of the Town of Beginnings.

Nobody had seen him.

And the entire way over, he had been planning the route that he would be taking to get to the stalls.

Kirito had spent enough time in that city to know where everything was. He had a really good mental map of the place. He had spent so much time jumping over those rooftops in the past that it was inevitable, really.

But before executing his plan, he had to do a quick test first.

And that's what he was up to now.

With his camouflage still up, he was right on the border of the safe zone, right in front of the city gate.

If he took even a single step forwards, he would enter the safe zone, and if his plan was right, he would get that timer that indicated how long it would take for the guards to show up.

Last time, that timer had been 5 minutes. But would it still be that amount?

Was there instead, some kind of recognition mechanic? Where because he had been in the city before as an orange player, the guards would 'recognize' him and spawn in sooner?

That's what this test was meant to check for.

He was going to step into the zone a few times, and spend a minute or two each time just watching the timer go down to see if it changed over time.

He had to be sure that he had his 5 minutes and that nothing unexpected happened.

* * *

Everything was go.

He had his 5 minutes. His test confirmed that his plan would work.

Kirito sprinted into the city.

* * *

His AGI stat was much higher now then it had been on that first day.

He could jump a lot higher now. In fact, he could jump higher now than he had been able to even back in the beta. His AGI stat was better, and he was well past the level of his old character.

He could do wall runs with ease.

He hadn't needed to find a staircase at all. He had literally gone up the closest vertical wall as fast as he could, and made it onto the rooftops.

Almost nobody was walking around this early in the morning, so he basically had the streets to himself.

He wasn't really limited in the route he took either.

Jumping from roof to roof was easy, now. He didn't even need to skill-jump. He could leap farther now with just his base stats than he had been able to with a skill jump on the first day.

And with that range, he started jumping over the alleyways, heading in as close to a straight line to the stalls as he could while keeping an eye on the guard timer on his menu in front of him.

It was at 4:32 and counting down.

* * *

At 3:50, Kirito had to make a quick detour, as, for some reason, some random group of players was just loitering around on one of the rooftops he had wanted to jump to.

Kirito clicked his tongue in annoyance, and went around them.

That lost him a couple of seconds…

* * *

Perfect, Kirito thought. Exactly as planned.

At 3:21, he had landed in the market area, and there were about a dozen players stealing from the stalls.

He was still within his margin of error. Even if he wasn't out of the city right at the 0:00 mark, as long as he was on the outskirts by then, the guards wouldn't get to him in time.

Kirito deactivated his camouflage and pulled out a bag full of 10,000 cor.

He would be way overpaying, since he didn't have a lot of time to barter with anyone.

"Hey," Kirito called out to a couple of the players nearby, after leaning up against one of the walls.

His standard 'Mask' and cursor hiding ability were both active.

"Huh?" A player replied.

A couple of the other players in the area turned to face him.

"This bag has 10,000 cor inside," Kirito claimed as he held it up. "The first person to drop trade me a bar glass gets it."

Kirito quickly elaborated, just in case they happened to be noobs and were unfamiliar with the terminology.

"Just throw it my way and relinquish your control over it, and the money's yours."

There was a brief moment of silence.

"What the hell?" One of the players asked in surprise. "Why?"

Two of the other players in the area exchanged glances.

"It doesn't matter," Kirito replied. "Don't ask questions, relinquish your control over it, and toss it my way. They're worthless anyways. What have you got to lose?"

Kirito cringed on the inside. He felt like some sort of slimy salesman.

"Buddy," one of the players began, "I don't know what the hell you're after, but this is some shady shit."

' _Just give me the glass already damn you,'_ Kirito complained mentally.

Before anyone else could respond, Kirito caught a bar glass that had been thrown his way by another player further back.

"There you go," the player then said.

Now, Kirito was holding both the bag of cor, and an empty glass.

There was another moment of silence.

Everyone else was watching in curiosity to see what he'd do next.

"Thanks," Kirito replied, immediately tossing the bag of cash over to the player that had given the glass to him.

"Wha-!" One of the players immediately shouted in disbelief. "He was being serious?!"

Kirito heard nothing else from them, as he had left the area already.

He was on the rooftops seconds later, after rounding a corner to get out of sight of the players, and running up the wall, activating his camouflage in the process.

The voices of the players died out as he jumped to the next rooftop.

Kirito glanced at his timer.

2:51 left.

He had this in the bag.

* * *

Going backwards had been a little trickier, but not by a whole lot.

Just a few extra seconds.

Kirito landed on the ground after jumping off the final rooftop, and crossed the border out of the safe zone.

0:31 had been the last number he had seen before the timer had vanished from his interface.

He didn't stop running though, even after leaving the city.

The first part of the plan had been a success. But he needed to get to the orange tree now.

He continued to sprint down the road in the same manner that he had on his way over to the city from Horunka.

Running next to the road with Hide active, and periodically slowing to a walk every time he came across another player.

* * *

He knew where the tree was by heart.

It was a common waypoint, actually. Players would often give directions using it as a sort of landmark.

' _Where are the Iron Caves at?_ ' Someone would ask.

' _Oh? They're just a couple of minutes west of the Orange Tree.'_

Those types of conversations happened all the time.

The annoying part was that it wasn't near Horunka, though. It was on the eastern side of the floor, and was about as far away from Horunka as the Town of Beginnings was. It was just in another direction.

Which meant that he was in for another annoying, and lengthy run.

* * *

Kirito drifted away from the road as soon as a clearing he recognized came into view.

It was the first milestone on his way to the tree.

He turned to his right at that point, facing east, and ran into the same field he had killed that crasher in on day 1.

He made sure to run along the treeline, as there were a few parties doing some late night hunting, fighting the boars and the wolves in the area, so he made sure to keep his distance from them.

Nobody saw him, though. Just like always.

He was beginning to get used to the reliability of his camouflage, and found that he did not need to be nearly as cautious as he had been with it earlier.

It was a _really_ strong camouflage.

He was about 15 minutes away from the tree after entering the next cluster of trees.

* * *

He ran through another forest, one that was much less dense than the one near his cave was.

And after another few minutes of running, he found himself at the orange tree.

Without slowing down, Kirito did a wall run up the tree, grabbed a branch, and pulled himself up onto it.

Then he started collecting oranges.

Nobody else was around, monster or player. So he could grab as many as he wanted without interruption.

He ended up with 10.

He didn't need that many, but that was the amount that he could easily reach with his arms without having to climb to a different branch.

He didn't take any more than that.

Instead, he pulled out the bar glass he had gotten, and squeezed three of the oranges into it to get a full glass.

He had had to quickly peel them, but for the most part, after that, the game handled most of the work.

They would despawn after being squeezed into the glass, his glass would glow, and it would fill slightly, each orange contributing about a third of the volume of the glass.

The rest of the oranges he had grabbed, he tossed into his inventory, and he put his new glass of orange juice there as well.

Then he jumped off the tree and started running towards Horunka again.

* * *

It was annoying just how self-sufficient he needed to be now with his cursor.

All of these simple things he had never thought about before had to be done without much assistance from anyone. All from scratch.

Just getting a glass of orange juice had taken him almost 3 hours.

It was so annoying.

He was going to need to recycle as many of his resources as possible now, and make sure that he didn't waste anything. The simplest, junk items could prove invaluable in the future.

But he had the glass now. And he had another 7 oranges for other purposes in the future. He didn't intend to actually drink his glass of juice so he would be reusing the same one over and over every time he wanted to give out a job.

Kirito ran across another field and turned again, causing him to begin to drift towards the road that would lead him to the eastern entrance of Horunka.

He continued on.

* * *

Kirito stepped into the same dark alley he had retreated into to think up his plan in the first place. The one just outside that bar.

Then he looked at the time again.

4:45 a.m.

That had taken so long.

Sighing, Kirito stepped into the bar once more.

* * *

This time, upon deactivating his Hide when nobody was looking, he actually made it to an empty table.

He had had to wait a minute or two in that corner since there were a good number of people in the room and he had to wait for them all to look away at the same time, but he had found an opportunity and had taken it. If someone had been watching, they would have probably seen him just shimmer into existence. But since nobody had shouted out in surprise or anything, he was pretty sure that nobody had been watching.

After taking a seat, he opened up his inventory, and took out his drink.

Then he angled it carefully on the coaster in front of him, in accordance to the tradition.

The table he was at was dark, and he wouldn't be surprised if, due to his darkened, hooded appearance, people mistook him for some sort of evil villain.

Which, come to think of it, was not entirely untrue.

But all player cursors were hidden inside restaurants and bars, so his own hidden cursor didn't stand out at all.

He watched closely as players walked in and out of the building.

It seemed that this one was pretty popular. He had overheard a lot of conversations already, from other players doing exactly what he was right now. Giving out jobs.

While he waited, he went over everything that he needed to say.

* * *

It took only about ten minutes for a player to sit down at the table in front of him.

As was typical, the player simply asked, "How much?"

Most players, particularly ones that just did jobs like this for a living, always wanted to know the price before even hearing the job. If it was too cheap, it wasn't worth the time usually.

Kirito answered.

"Ten thousand up front, and an ovule if the information is good," Kirito answered as he pulled a bag of Cor onto the table, as well as an ovule, to show that he was being serious.

The player's eyes widened considerably at that.

It was roughly 30,000 cor worth of wealth. Almost nothing for someone like Kirito, but it was a lot of money for a low leveled player. That was the kind of money needed to buy an Anneal Blade that had been upgraded multiple times.

But Kirito wanted to gain a reputation here as someone who paid a lot of money for his jobs to get done properly.

"What's the job?" The player asked, quickly opening his menu and navigating to the in-game notepad feature so he could write down the details.

"I need information. It's a bit of a strange request."

"Go on."

"Alright. I need a few things. The first is a general history of what's been going on. I won't say why this is the case, but I want you to pretend as if I've been living under a rock since the first day of this game. Pretend that even basic common knowledge is unknown to me, aside from the typical 'Kayaba trapped us all here' nonsense."

Kirito didn't care at all that he was basically announcing that he knew nothing about the game at all, as his identity was hidden, and these types of players didn't really care about stuff like that. They wanted the money, and didn't care about how weird the job was.

For all this player knew, Kirito was asking for information he already had just to test to see if this player was good enough for a more important job later on. Which was actually a pretty common thing for rich players to do. He wouldn't be surprised at all if this player assumed that that's what was happening here.

Kirito continued on, after observing the player writing down all of the details.

"Then, I want a rundown on any information you have on this floor's boss. Has it been found? When, if it has? Why, if it hasn't?"

"Then, I want as much information as you can on the specific skills: Acrobatics, Mixing, and Hiding."

"Feel free to go to The Rat for any of this information, I will pay whatever cost she demands for it if you do. Just let me know what it is when you come back, if you choose to go that route."

"And be as detailed as possible," Kirito emphasized. "If you answer those requests to the bare minimum, the ovule is yours. But if you exceed my expectations, there is a potential for a significant bonus on top of it all."

"Be as thorough as you can. So, are you willing to accept?" Kirito asked.

"Yes," the player answered immediately.

"Good. I'll be here again at the same time tomorrow."

Kirito tapped on the bag of 10,000 cor that he had put onto the table, and relinquished his ownership of it. He then slid it over to the other player.

The player picked it up, observed the amount contained inside from his interface, claimed ownership of the bag, placed it into his inventory, and then left the bar without another word.

Kirito left the bar himself, a few minutes later.

He made sure to take his glass of juice with him before leaving though. He hadn't even touched it, so it was still full.

He walked out the door, activated his Hide ability in a dark alley, and activated his ring's effect. He waited for 5 minutes, and then he teleported to the spawn point of the giant nepenthe.

Since he was there already, rather than going back to his cave for the night, he decided to just beat the thing now, to charge up his ring again.

After getting into position, the ground started shaking, and the giant spawned.

The fight took less than 30 minutes.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	11. Subtlety

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito returned the next day to that same table in that same bar.

He had plotted out the route he had taken from his cave to Horunka the previous day through those thick forests on his in-game map, however, so it had taken significantly less effort to get there this time around.

He had decided to instead go _around_ the forest west of Horunka, instead of through it, so that he wouldn't accidentally kill anyone with his ridiculously high special Nepenthe spawn rate.

He had spent the day grinding Nepenthes again. Mostly for the ovules, but also so that he could start working towards that final Ring of Acid upgrade.

He really wanted to know what that would unlock for him.

While he was waiting for the player he had met the previous day to show up, he observed the other people walking in and out of the bar.

He had pulled out his drink again in the event that that player had simply run off with his money the previous day and had no intentions of returning, but he hadn't angled it on the coaster yet. That way, he could just get another player to do the same job, if the player was a no-show.

But, he hadn't needed to. The player showed up right on schedule, spotted him, and sat down in the chair across from him.

The information the player gave him was very thorough. And also quite disturbing.

2,000 players had died already. Most of them being from players jumping over the edge of the map, thinking that the whole situation wasn't real.

A lot of others had simply died because of not knowing how to play the game properly.

There were a lot of deaths amongst the beta testers, too, as there had been a number of differences found between the beta and this new version of the game.

Kirito had suspected that something along those lines was possible, but he hadn't actually found too many notable differences himself yet.

These players had searched out items that they knew the locations of beforehand, and had fallen into traps that had been different from the previous game. As a result, in terms of percentages, beta testers had the highest casualty rate of all players.

It was estimated that over a third of all former beta testers were now dead.

And some part of Kirito felt like he had dodged a massive bullet after hearing that. He would have probably done exactly what they had done, himself.

He had seriously considered rushing to get good equipment from some of the dungeons that he knew the locations of right at the start of the game. However, he had changed his mind upon estimating how many other beta testers would be doing the same thing.

He would have been competing with too many people, and because that would have risked his identity if he ever bumped into someone, he had decided to only ever enter a dungeon if it were a new one that he had discovered himself, to minimize the likelihood of those encounters occurring.

Beta testers would go for the gear they knew the locations of right at the start of the game, after all. That was just common sense. If you knew where a super cool sword was, and you realized you were stuck in a death game, and you knew that only a few hundred other people knew the same thing you did, why wouldn't you go for it while everyone else was busy freaking out?

Surely at least someone would. Who out of those people would instead say 'you know what? Instead, I'm going to go in a random direction that nobody has been to yet, and effectively throw away my advantage of having useful prior knowledge.'

Only people like Kirito would. Or at least players with his unique situation.

And this idea was the entire foundation of his strategy so far.

He wanted to go where the fewest players were.

New players would stick together where it was safe, and beta testers would stick to what they knew.

Which meant that almost nobody went running into the unknown like he had.

Any place he discovered would basically belong to him for the foreseeable future, as a result.

And exploring brand new dungeons, instead of ones he knew the layouts of already from the beta, had the added advantage of preventing him from accidentally falling into the mindset of 'oh, I already know where everything is in this dungeon so I can let my guard down.'

People relaxed in familiar territory after all, whether they tried to or not. It was just human nature. And that was a dangerous thing.

Because of all of this, he hadn't been caught in any of those beta-targeting traps. He hadn't gone into a dungeon thinking he knew where everything was, only to be blindsided by something new.

All because of his cursor, and the strategy he had implemented as a result of it.

He had no idea what would have happened had he been green instead.

The player in front of him then explained how there was a massive rift forming between the beta testers and the newer players.

A lot of the new players blamed most of the deaths so far on the beta testers, and some people had already tried to buy lists of names of former beta testers from Argo as a result.

The belief was that beta testers had run off at the start of the game to take all the best quests and to fend for themselves, leaving everyone else behind.

Which was not entirely without merit.

He had done that himself, after all. But not just because he was a beta tester. It was because he was a red player. A PKer, who would not be able to survive anywhere else.

The player had then given him a book filled with information about the game and about the various skills. It had been compiled by Argo herself, and was backed by information from dozens of other beta testers.

It contained a lot of useful information, most of which Kirito knew already. But there was a page on Mixing, one on Acrobatics, and one on Hiding, pages he would have to go through in detail later.

Then the player told him about the floor boss, the main thing Kirito had wanted to know about.

There was a meeting coming up to decide on how to deal with it. And to explain that while the boss room hadn't been found just yet, it was essentially inevitable that it would be, as over three quarters of the labyrinth had been cleared out already.

This meeting would take place on December 2nd. In 5 days, in other words.

Which Kirito had mixed feelings about. The players of the game were getting ready to take on the floor boss.

Which was great.

But it meant he probably wouldn't be able to solo it.

He almost surely wouldn't be ready in time. Not unless he figured out a way to buy and sell items, anyways.

And it wasn't like anybody would let him join in the raid, either. Nobody would accept a red player as a party member, after all.

He would really only get the chance to fight it if the raid failed, then. He might just have to cut his losses on the first floor, and instead make a solo attempt on the second floor boss.

Finally, and to his surprise, the player told him about a new rumour about an incredibly powerful player that was now being called 'The Hooded Demon', who had saved several parties of players after single-handedly taking on an army of Little Nepenthes.

Those parties that this unknown player had saved had been the first known to survive after a fruit had burst. And now there were a lot of people looking for this new player who had apparently taken out the entire army himself.

Which was _not_ good news at all.

Argo was probably all over that rumour now, and was probably scouring the forest for clues.

It was ridiculous. It had been a single day since then, and people were going crazy over a rumour.

Why couldn't he have just remembered his special Nepenthe spawn rate and just gone around the forest? Now people were looking for him.

"And that's everything," the player finally finished.

"Perfect. That was actually extremely helpful," Kirito replied.

He dug through his inventory and pulled out two ovules and placed them on the table.

He'd give the player a bonus, because why not? He had clearly gone to Argo for some of that, and she charged for everything.

He relinquished his control over both of them and slid them over to the player.

"Take both," Kirito said.

The player's eyes widened in surprise again.

"Thank you," the player replied in amazement, after taking the ovules.

"Don't mention it. Thanks for the info."

The player got up and left shortly after.

Kirito again waited a few more minutes before getting up himself, grabbing his drink again, leaving, and teleporting back to the nepenthe boss to recharge his ring.

* * *

In his cave that night, he made a very, very, annoying revelation.

He had been skimming through his new guidebook when he had learned about the Monument of Life in the Town of Beginnings.

Apparently, there was a wall full of usernames corresponding to each of the players left in the game.

Players that had died so far were crossed out, and players that hadn't, weren't.

But the wall contained _all_ players in the game.

Including his.

Which meant that Argo knew he was alive, well, and was actively ignoring her.

He had just finished processing that very irritating piece of news just in time for Argo's nightly 'make-Kirito's-interface-ding-endlessly' routine.

 _That_ was why she had never given up after all this time.

She knew.

She had known all this time.

Plausible deniability wouldn't work.

She must be _so_ pissed at him.

' _Well…'_ he thought to himself, if she wasn't pissed yet, she sure would be in a few moments.

He really hoped the absolute shitshow he was about to unleash wouldn't ever catch up to him.

Kirito glanced at his interface.

_Argo would like to add you as a friend! Would you like to accept?_

_Yes / No_

He had seen that message so many times in the game so far.

Kirito tapped a few buttons on his menu.

_You have muted Argo. This player can no longer send you messages._

It felt like a declaration of war.

Though it wasn't as bad as it would have been had he blocked her instead. That would have been way worse.

There was a very subtle difference between blocking and muting, but they were almost identical from a practical standpoint.

Most of the major differences really stemmed from the fact that you could mute people on your friends list, and have them still technically be your friend, which was a functionality that did not exist for blocking.

Which meant that skills and other mechanics in the game that used the members of your friend list in some way could potentially include muted players, but not blocked ones.

Like the Tracking modifier in the Searching skill, for example. That modifier allowed you to track down friends via their footprints, among other things. And this would work even if your friend was muted.

Since blocked players couldn't be on your friend list though, it wouldn't work on them. And similarly, the player you blocked couldn't use their skills on you.

A blocked player couldn't track you, in other words. While a muted player potentially could, provided they were on your friend list.

There were a few other important differences between blocking and muting, like the fact that you could trade with a muted player, but could not with a blocked one, but ultimately, the difference between these two concepts was very subtle.

It really was one of those situations where unless you truly understood how the game worked, it took some time to wrap your head around just why there was a need for both muting and blocking to be offered as options since they both seemed to do the same thing.

They practically were the same thing when the player you muted wasn't on your friend list.

But they weren't seen as the same by players, and that was the important bit. Blocking had a stigma attached that just seemed much harsher.

If a player gets blocked, they tend to get the impression that the person who blocked them hates their guts, whether or not that was actually true. Whereas a player getting muted might get the impression that the person who muted them was just annoyed with them, whether or not that was true.

But blocking was almost always seen as worse.

It removed the player from your friend list and was seen as a slap in the face if you did it to a friend, whereas muting was usually seen as a much softer slap on the wrist.

But it was still a metaphorical slap of some form, and he had just done that to Argo.

And for a moment... he could almost _feel_ the rage that the message Argo had just received from the system had unleashed. She was not one to take such things lying down, after all.

The game had undoubtedly just sent her a message explaining that he had just muted her.

Argo would probably scour the game for him now, so he was going to have her web of spies after him, probably for the rest of the game.

But they were already looking for him anyway, so his situation didn't change too much, all things considered.

He was the poorly named "Hooded Demon," after all, and everyone was trying to find him.

But at least he'd have some peace and quiet from the stupid _dings_ now _._

* * *

' _Hang on a minute…'_ Kirito thought while trying to fall asleep a few hours later.

It had been one of those random thoughts that just showed up in your head and wouldn't leave you alone until you thought through all of the consequences more thoroughly.

The Monument of Life showed all the players that had died so far by crossing out their names. But when a player was actually at the monument, you could tap on any of these names and a brief description of where and how they had died would be provided.

That was what the guidebook had said, anyways.

That meant… and how had he not realized it sooner?... That meant that there was a crossed out name on that monument that, when tapped by someone, would show the description: 'killed in combat by Kirito,' or another description along those lines.

He had never seen the monument himself before, as it hadn't been in the beta, but there was a good chance that he was implicated as a PKer right on it.

All someone would have to do is tap on _that_ name on the monument. The name of the crasher he had killed on the first day.

And that revelation made his stomach drop.

Okay. There was a chance that wasn't the case too, to be fair.

It certainly didn't really help his internal freak-out all that much, though.

But what if the monument simply said 'killed by another player' on it instead? Or some other description that left out his name specifically? That would avoid all of his new problems.

How that description was worded could potentially steer events towards his own death or away from it.

Did the rest of the players know? Or didn't they?

What if Argo found out?

 _That_ could be a disaster.

Would she spread that sort of information around if she found it? Painting him as a target?

' _What's this?'_ He could hear her say in his head. ' _Ki-bou killed someone? What a jerk. Hey everyone! If you see a player named Kirito, send him to jail or kill him! He's a PKer! A murderer!'_

Would she do that? He wanted to say no, but he didn't really know if they were actually friends anymore. He had muted her after all, and had totally ignored her since day one...

Maybe he was being paranoid, but having someone like Argo starting a witch hunt after him would make things so much harder.

But for her to even do that, she would have to find that piece of information on the Monument first. Was that possible in the 21 days-ish since the start of the game if there were a concerted effort into systematically going through all of the names like that?

There were about 2,000 players crossed out from what he had learned so far, and it _would_ be considered valuable information to get a team in there to classify all causes of death to learn as much as possible about the game. Argo probably had a team doing that now.

But how long would it take to finish?

A name could probably be processed in about 30 seconds, as a rough estimate. He didn't know how detailed those descriptions were, so he couldn't be sure. It could even be faster, but for now, he assumed that it would take about that amount of time.

He then ran through the mental math in his head.

At 30 seconds per name, that would take…

30 times 2,000 seconds...

So that equaled about 60,000 seconds total.

Which equaled… what? 17 hours?

16.6 repeating, technically.

So, if his math was right it would take about 17 hours for one person to go through the entire list of names.

That was _way_ too short a time for his liking. There was a good chance that he had already been found out, then. Especially if Argo's team had more than one person in it.

There were probably a lot of people willing to do that type of work, too. Argo could hire basically anyone to do the job that was still too afraid of leaving the starting city. Which was still a lot of people, from the information he had bought from that player.

The team would go through the entire wall of names, writing down all of the players that had shown up as PKers in the descriptions of the dead, compile them into a list, and give it to Argo.

Then she'd go through it herself and find his name on it.

Maybe she'd think it was a mistake and go to the monument in person to check for herself… and she'd see that it was true.

What would she do then?

Why had she still been trying to add him as a friend, even?

Had she not thought to do that yet? To go through that process? To hire a team to go through all the names? Was his name even there in that description to begin with?

' _What are you up to, Argo?'_

He did not find very much sleep that night at all.

His mind just wouldn't shut up.

* * *

Kirito was on his way to Tolbana next.

During his tossing and turning in the middle of the night, he had eventually decided to just pull out the guidebook and scour through it to see if he had missed any details that could finally put his mind at ease.

He had been disappointed though, as the details of what was included on the description of a crossed out name were left ambiguous. Argo and the other authors of the book had probably never anticipated that that tiny piece of information was important. Normal people could just check themselves, after all...

But after failing to resolve his conundrum, he had decided to go through some more of the information in there.

He still had a long way to go to finish reading it, but some of the information had been interesting.

In particular, there was a front line player market set up and he wanted to check it out.

The market was located inside a fairly large cafe, and it was set up in a similar fashion to the system of giving out player quests.

You sat down, placed a sign in front of you of what you were selling, and for how much, and people would decide whether they wanted to buy from you.

It was a simple system that had developed organically due to the number of players that spent all their time in the area.

Tolbana happened to be the closest town to the front lines, so it was the place where most of the elite players shopped for their weapons and gear.

He wanted to check to see what the going prices were for nepenthe ovules. And he intended to sell a lot of them.

Last night hadn't been all bad news, after all. He had figured something else out.

He was able to drop trade without suspicion, there. He had done so just last night with that player he had hired in the bar, after all.

He could take an item in his inventory, relinquish his control over it, and hand it to someone else.

He had known he could do that in player markets well before today, obviously, but what he hadn't anticipated was the amount of players that actually traded that way.

He could hide behind another layer of plausible deniability.

In the guidebook itself, it stated that some players when trading, wanted to remain anonymous so they would not go through the trade window. And there were any number of reasons why.

Some people were too shy to show their face, some people didn't want to gain any sort of reputation that would follow them around everywhere, and there were a bunch of other reasons.

If you had a rare item you were trying to sell for a high price and it became known, you might get targeted if that information was tied to your name, too.

And so to prevent these things, the book stated that some players would avoid using formal trade windows and would drop trade instead, as those windows would otherwise reveal their names.

The book didn't specifically mention that this mechanic could also be abused in a roundabout manner to hide your cursor colour, though.

Cursors were shown on the trade window next to your name, but they were also usually shown right above your head in most situations.

But not when indoors. Nobody had cursors then, and by also not using the trade window it was possible to completely hide that information without anybody even realizing.

So he could go to these markets with all of his identity protections up, and still not rouse any suspicion. They would look at his cloaked form and missing cursor and think: 'hey, he's just another merchant who doesn't want to reveal his name.'

They wouldn't think: 'Some guy is trying to hide his name? Orange player!'

Because there were legitimate reasons to hide, and lots of people did. And because nobody could tell the difference between him hiding his own cursor and the game hiding it for him.

The guidebook had explained all of this in the first place to prevent these people from being seen as suspicious. New players might think it was a super shady business deal when trading with someone anonymously like that and get scared, so the article was needed.

But it gave people like him cover.

He could pretend to be hiding his identity for those reasons, and as a result, he could buy and sell items from other players now.

As long as he was indoors.

If the player market had instead been outdoors, then he would have been the only one without a cursor and he would have stuck out in the crowd.

He would have been faced with the choice of either going without a cursor due to him hiding it with an ability, or not doing that and walking around with an orange one over his head.

But even though one of those options was clearly the better option of the two, having a missing cursor while outdoors could be easily spotted by an observant player that understood how the game worked, even if this detail would be missed by most other players in the area due to the sea of green cursors that would be flooding the area around him.

It would be hard to find the one guy without a cursor in a crowd of dozens of players, but all it would take was one person to blow his cover.

But since the market wasn't outside, this wasn't a problem.

It was strange how all of these tiny details that nobody typically thought about all accumulated together to create the potential to save his life.

 _Where_ the market was located inside that town made all the difference in the world.

* * *

Kirito sat down at a seat in the cafe after sneaking in the same way as he had in that bar back in Horunka Village.

Activate Hide, sneak inside, deactivate it in a dark corner when nobody was looking, and take a seat at an empty table.

He then spent a little bit of time listening in on the conversations in the crowded cafe, picking up on the fact that ovules were selling for about 16,000 each, and that nobody was selling them in bulk.

Which made sense. Kirito had seen the fierce competition in the forest. It would be almost impossible for anyone to get their hands on one, let alone multiple.

So Kirito made a sign, indicating that he was selling them for 14,000. He could have gone a lot lower if he really wanted to, but his stance on money had shifted recently.

He had a few new ideas for massive projects that he wanted to carry out in the near future that required a lot of cor to pull off.

He had finally found a use for his wealth.

Now that he could trade openly with others without suspicion, he could finally start solving some of his problems.

He could buy the gear he needed for an attempt at the floor boss. He could buy better equipment and a full set of combat potions used for high level PVM and PVP.

He would not have to gather all of these things himself anymore.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg. So many possibilities had opened up for him now that he could participate in trades and could give out player quests.

But first, he needed more money. While he was probably already among the richest players in the entire game, almost all of his assets were in the form of random drops. He needed to liquidate everything he didn't need as soon as possible.

And he intended to get rid of the ovules first. That would get him far more cor than simply selling off his random drops would.

He had to milk this advantage for as long as possible. It was possible, after all, that after Illfang was defeated and everyone made it to the second floor, that the next front line player market would not be located indoors.

It could be outside somewhere, where he wouldn't be able to use it.

So he had to get rid of everything he didn't need, _now_. And he also had to buy everything he could while he had this chance.

With this in mind, he wrote the sign, angled it so that everyone could see, and then he waited.

* * *

He did not wait long at all.

Since ovules were so rare, nobody else had been able to collect such a large number of them, so nobody had been able to set up a shop that exclusively sold them. This essentially gave him a complete monopoly on the item.

The first few players glanced at his sign, did a double take, and came by to check to see if he was being serious.

The first player, thinking he was pretty clever, decided to buy one from him and then sell it off immediately for a higher price. Effectively flipping it for 2,000 cor profit.

But it didn't work out very well considering Kirito had more.

He could keep the price as low as he wanted permanently.

The players lined right up after learning that he was legit.

He never used the trade window however. For the same reasons as always. He explained right on the sign that he wouldn't initiate a formal trade with anyone. Instead, they would be drop trading.

Nobody thought of it as suspicious. He wasn't an orange player to them, he was just an everyday merchant that wanted to remain anonymous.

It was also a practice that a lot of these shops tended to do because it was so much faster when buying single items than going through the menu to send a trade request was.

Trade requests were really only useful when there were a lot of items to be exchanged between players. More than can typically be carried in your hands. Or to prevent drop trading scams when there weren't any witnesses around.

A couple of players watched the sudden surge of success of his 'shop' with increasingly widened eyes. They were clearly trying to figure out how he had managed to get so many ovules.

Some even tried to ask him in person, but he never gave a straight answer. Simply saying he had gotten them as drops from a bunch of flowered Nepenthes.

A true, yet annoyingly vague answer that didn't satisfy them at all.

As the crowd increased in size, Kirito saw the need to hire a mediator to ensure that a drop trade didn't get intercepted since he wasn't using a trade window.

And since his shop had been so successful, he hadn't even needed to get up to look for one. Several players in the area offered to do this for him.

Kirito, not knowing who to pick, just went with the first person to offer.

It was a massive opportunity for them. Third parties charged a constant rate per trade, for their services. And since his shop was so successful, that added up astonishingly quickly.

And the way that the system worked was pretty simple. The third party player would be the player that Kirito drop traded with. And then they would use a formal trade window with whoever the customer was.

This made it virtually impossible for a customer to steal from him.

And since the third party player he was working with had publicly announced his name, if _that_ player tried to steal from him instead, he would be blacklisted from the market, and his life would be basically ruined.

All for the single ovule he would get out of it. It just wouldn't be worth it at all.

And since Kirito was making 14,000 per trade, the tiny 300 cor tax that he had to pay per trade to the player working with him to ensure that the transaction completed successfully was well worth it.

It was peanuts to him.

But it really showcased to him just how creative some people were when trying to make a living in SAO. All this guy had to do was sit next to him and do all the trading for him. And just for doing that, since Kirito was making so many trades, the player was earning money at the rate of a front line clearer.

He sold 95 ovules on that day alone, which made him over a million cor.

But he intended to come back the next day to sell even more. It was likely that the word had started to spread now, about a mysterious merchant who sold them cheaply, and in bulk in Tolbana, and he was hoping to get even more buyers the next day as a result.

With a final word to the player helping him out, letting him know that Kirito would hire them again the next day if they showed up again, he left the market.

Everyone in the area at the time who had wanted an ovule had bought one, so it wasn't worth the time to stick around anymore.

Kirito needed to give it some time for the word of his shop to spread.

* * *

The Secret Medicine of the Forest was a quest that had gotten a lot of players killed. And it was causing a huge problem, in his opinion.

The hunting areas were too crowded. Too many people were getting complacent as a result of their boredom during the quest, and were getting caught flat footed whenever a nepenthe fruit suddenly exploded.

And the worst part was, it was an almost _necessary_ quest to complete. The Anneal Blade was just too good in comparison to the other swords on the floor. And literally thousands of players were now either trying to get one, or had realized that they'd never get one due to the crowds of people doing the quest.

And that created a problem.

One that Kirito himself was almost uniquely capable of solving.

Still, nobody had ventured out into the thick forests as far as he had, so he was still the only one who knew about the normal sized Nepenthes that far out.

And he was the only one who had killed such an insane amount of them so far.

So when the word spread that a nameless merchant was seemingly selling an endless supply of ovules in Tolbana, a lot of players took notice.

A _lot_ of players went there.

He had been sitting in his chair on his second day with his shop open for over six hours now. And in that time, he had made over 5,000,000 cor.

That was after deducting the 300 cor per trade to his helper, too. The same one from yesterday.

Kirito had experienced a bit of a revelation during that time.

He was single-handedly affecting the balance of the game.

He was single-handedly increasing the strength of the entire player base with his tiny shop.

It was ridiculous, just how many people bought an ovule from him. Some players had even bought multiple.

It had never been about the price, he had realized. It had always been about the supply.

The demand had always been there. Plenty of players were both willing and able to buy an ovule for 16,000 cor. But most of them just hadn't been able to find a seller so they couldn't.

Kirito had basically undermined the entire ovule market, rendering what was once rare, extremely common. But since he had a monopoly on that supply, he could keep the price from plummeting since he had no competition.

He was essentially the sole source of all new Anneal Blades coming into the game from that point forward.

The entire player base would come to him to get that sword now. Not to that forest on the outskirts of Horunka.

And the best part of it all was that it was a win for everyone.

He got filthy rich, the game got flooded with powerful weapons, and everybody was better off for it.

He had probably just saved dozens of lives with this scheme.

And even that wasn't the end of the upsides to his shop.

He had yet another purpose behind this plan of his.

One that was all about market forces. When, all of a sudden, the market became saturated with the best possible sword in the game so far, people would start trying to upgrade them.

Which meant that the various blacksmiths out there would begin to level up significantly in order to keep up with the demand of maintaining and upgrading all of those new, state of the art weapons.

And at some point, Kirito intended to essentially hire out one of those player smiths to work on his equipment almost exclusively.

After he bought the best equipment for himself first, of course. That way, he wouldn't have to waste a skill slot on Blacksmithing.

And since he was going to get someone else to maintain his equipment, in order to minimize the risk of getting any of it broken during this process from a failed upgrade attempt or something, those smiths needed to be decently levelled when he finally chose to hire one.

So he was essentially leveling up the smith he wanted to hire, whoever they may be, indirectly by saturating the market with swords that were just begging to be upgraded.

It was an interesting scheme.

One that he would admittedly never do if he had been a green player. It felt almost like stealing, on some level. But he had realized long ago that any one of the players he met could try to kill him in the future. So he needed to prepare for that in the meantime.

But all of this market manipulation that he was doing, and all of those subtle behind the scenes strategies of his just felt wrong on some level to him. He had never tried to do anything like it before. It just wasn't how he usually played games.

But it seemed that being a shady shopkeeper for now was necessary to keep himself alive.

Kirito leaned back in his chair.

What would he have been doing now, he wondered, had he been green?

* * *

He stayed in his 'shop' for another two hours, making another million cor, and then he left, saying he'd be back the next day.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	12. Market Shenanigans

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

"Come on man! You have to tell me where you're getting all of these ovules!"

' _No.'_

"Yeah! You shouldn't be keeping it a secret!"

' _Watch me.'_

Kirito had gotten used to the madness by now. It had always been like this. Right from the beginning.

Just… chaos. So many people would be shouting at him, trying to get him to give them a hint of some kind, but he had learned to tune it all out after the first ten minutes or so on that first day his shop was open.

He had a strategy.

Say nothing at all. He was not confident in his ability to lie, or to act, so he wouldn't. He'd just be a wall.

Kirito's helper laughed.

 _Timely Advice_ was his name. And in Kirito's opinion, that was really all anyone needed to know about the guy to understand exactly the type of person that he was. One of those players that tried to turn their username into something either funny, or ironic. It was probably some sort of inside joke that he didn't understand.

"My friend here doesn't have to tell you anything," Timely Advice replied.

Kirito grinned under his hood.

He had to admit... the guy helping him with these trades was awesome.

"You shut up _Timely_! Of course _you_ would say that, you're making a crapload of money off this!"

"You got that right."

He just didn't seem to care about anything. Everything just seemed to just bounce right off him. It was amazing to see. Kirito honestly envied his helper's ability to just say whatever was on his mind without a care about what anybody else thought about it.

"And besides, even if my buddy here did reveal how he was getting all of these ovules, it wouldn't even matter. "

"What are you talking about now?"

"You can only trade them in for a sword once. If you do the math, there are only about 8,000 players left in the game. Which means, once 8,000 ovules have been sold, nobody else will need any more, and they will stop selling. By the time you start trying to replicate what my friend here is doing, the opportunity will have already passed you by."

That wasn't technically true, Kirito thought to himself. Ovules had other uses, aside from trading them for that sword. His Mixing grind came to mind… But once the hype around the Anneal Blade died down when everyone that wanted one got their hands on it, it would make sense that the demand for them would drastically decrease, and the price would have to be lowered way down.

But Kirito had another plan that he wanted to execute soon that would sort of address that.

In a few hours, when noon hit, a lot of players would leave the markets to go eat lunch in one of the restaurants in the area, which meant that most of the chaos around his shop would die down for a bit.

It'd pick up again an hour or so later, but Kirito was waiting for that time.

He needed to ask his helper a question, and Kirito didn't want to break his facade of complete silence when there were people around to do it yet.

And besides… he had something else to worry about anyway.

He had noticed Argo's plant in the distance. Her spy.

Every now and then, the player would subtly glance his way. Casually eavesdropping on the conversation. Hoping for some hint to be revealed, so he could report it back to Argo.

Kirito had anticipated that this would happen in advance however, which was part of the reason why he vowed to never speak.

Argo was just ruthless when it came to information. She could make these wide, sweeping conclusions from just the tiniest hints.

Kirito knew all about it. He had seen just how shrewd she could be back in the beta.

Anything he ever said would be used against him somehow, so he couldn't let her spy hear anything out of him.

He had taken extensive precautions to counter anything she might try.

It was obvious that she would be intrigued about his merchant persona. Somebody knew about a source of super valuable ovules and she didn't. She'd have picked up on that as soon as the rumours had started flying and she'd definitely want in on it.

Kirito had predicted exactly the situation he was in at the moment, and had prepared for it.

Of course a spy would be sent to observe him. In fact, there had probably even been one watching him the previous day. Perhaps even the day before that. Though she would have had to have moved pretty quickly if that were the case. This was only his third day here, after all.

He hadn't managed to find any spies yesterday, or the day before, even though he had tried to look for them, but it was within reason for Argo to mobilize her network of spies within just a few hours of his first appearance to the playerbase.

But he had planned for it. He was ready to face whatever she had in store for him.

His identity protections were always up, Rigid Cloak and Mask were active, and his cursor was hidden, even though that wasn't technically necessary when he was indoors. He just always had the ability active.

So he was confident that nobody would be able to figure out who he was. Not without taking drastic measures, anyways.

Such measures would pretty much ruin Argo's reputation, however, should she try to implement them.

Argo was an info dealer. Which meant that the majority of her clients were in some sense, like Kirito. They were incredibly secretive, and some refused to even give her their names.

Some of her best sources of info were completely anonymous. That was just how spy networks tended to work in the game. Since Argo had a reputation of being willing to sell anything, it was just better for everyone involved if names were kept out of it to ensure anonymity.

That was the condition for a lot of spies to even consider working for someone like her.

Not all spies were like that, the one currently observing him was an example, but many were.

So, there was this set of unwritten rules that had developed on its own as a result of this that almost everyone knew all about.

A set of rules of engagement for dealing with these sorts of secretive players. A list of things that you do not do, even though you technically could.

If you are a merchant, or a spy, or are providing any sort of service at all, and you do not reveal your name, everyone has to respect those wishes.

It is your right as a player to hide your identity if you wish to.

It was absolutely possible for someone to stand right in front of Kirito, activate an overpowered search ability, and try to abruptly shatter all of his identity protections in an instant, while he was stuck sitting inside the cramped cafe.

He had countermeasures for even that ready, but they were probably unnecessary.

It was a terrible, terrible idea to do that to someone in front of a bunch of witnesses, if you wanted to keep any sort of honest reputation afterwards.

Doing this was so serious an offence, that there was a list of names of players that had done this, that almost nobody would trade, or speak with. Known untrustworthy people that had tried to identify someone who did not want to be identified.

Anonymity was such a critical component of the game that you just couldn't afford to deal only with players who were public.

Pretty much all of the top tier items and weapons were sold by anonymous players to ensure that they didn't get targeted out in the wild.

If you tried to identify one of these people, then why would any other anonymous player ever try to deal with you?

Anonymous players basically gave the rest of the playerbase an ultimatum. Deal with us, trade with us, provide us services on our terms, or don't. But if you don't, we will not come to you for anything. And you will not come to us. It was as simple as that.

The only aspect of a player that everyone seemed to agree was actually necessary to know, anonymous or not, was the colour of your cursor.

People in general just didn't want to get caught dealing with criminals. There was too much baggage there, especially now that the game had become a matter of life and death.

Hiding a name was fine. But the cursor was another matter. It didn't lie about the type of person you were.

Kirito could imagine that this trend was far more intense now than it had been in the beta.

There was a filter in place now. When SAO had been in beta, some people just felt like playing as orange players for entertainment purposes. But now, these people wouldn't even dream of doing that because it would ruin their life. So any player that was orange would be seen as way worse than they had been back then.

They were real this time. Orange players were real criminals, not pretenders or roleplayers. And you could be totally sure that they had done something that deserved punishment.

Who would ever want to be orange in a game like this?

This all meant that if you were orange, you couldn't actually hide in most circumstances when you tried dealing with others. If you hid your name, everyone would be looking for your cursor before trading or dealing with you. It was just the natural thing that tended to happen.

Which was why Kirito needed to be indoors and all that.

He wasn't hiding, he was just in a place where everyone's cursor was hidden by the game.

Plausible deniability.

It actually seemed like a bit of an oversight, now that he thought about it. Why was the market indoors? Had it just been the case that nobody had anticipated that orange players could take advantage of that? Or was it just expected that there would be no orange players in the game yet?

With everyone's need to know the cursor colour of the person they were dealing with, Kirito would have figured that somebody would have pointed this oversight out, and moved the market somewhere else.

But then again, there hadn't been a lot of orange players yet. He had yet to see another one at all, even. It was easily possible that nobody knew about all of the subtle cursor mechanics in the game yet, and that this simply hadn't been thought of.

There were still a lot of unknowns about the game, after all.

For example, what if Kirito deactivated his Hidden Cursor ability right now? While he was sitting indoors in his shop?

Would the game still hide it since he was in a building like it would for a green player?

Or was there some sort of an exception for orange players? Where the game decided that it would only hide a green player's cursor when they travelled into a building?

This, not even Kirito knew the answer to. He'd like to know, but he certainly couldn't afford to risk testing it out yet with so many people around.

Perhaps this was even some sort of trap.

Kirito narrowed his eyes.

That... would actually be incredibly clever if it was the case.

Deliberately put the market indoors to make orange players think exactly like Kirito had.

' _I can get away with trading with players even though I'm orange specifically because I'll be indoors. So the game will hide my cursor!'_

Then, thinking they were being pretty sneaky, they would go inside, and the game wouldn't hide them at all due to the cursor exception. Then everyone would see them. There would probably even be a coordinated effort by everyone in the area to then capture the person.

But Kirito had Hidden Cursor active. Which meant that if this was some sort of trap to lure out orange players, he could still slip through it unnoticed.

Kirito leaned back in his chair.

It was an unnerving thought if this was the case.

He had no idea if his cursor was being hidden by that indoors mechanic, or by his Hidden Cursor ability, and he couldn't find out unless he turned that ability off. Which was a terrible, terrible idea considering how precarious his current position was, just to test out a theory.

Someone could absolutely take advantage of that to turn this whole cafe into a potential death trap for orange players.

He could easily see himself falling for this. In fact, he probably would have.

But of course, it all assumed that there was that orange cursor exception while indoors, and it assumed that whoever had decided to place the market there in the first place knew about this subtle detail, and had planned to use it in this way.

Kirito really needed to step up his game, he realized.

He should have anticipated this potential trap long before ever setting foot inside this building.

He had not thought to specifically hide his cursor to avoid this possible cursor exception, and had instead kept it up as a habit.

The habit may have saved his life, sure. But he should have seen this.

He really needed to be more careful.

But in any case, cursor aside, he had taken some preparations in the case that Argo tried to do anything drastic to find out stuff about him, even if he was almost sure that she wouldn't go that far.

His 'shop' was a table in the corner of the room.

He had strategically selected this table, and had even selected the seating arrangement of both himself and his helper without making it obvious that he was doing so.

He had simply made sure to sit down first, forcing his helper into the only remaining seat on their side of the table.

Kirito was in the corner seat. Meaning, his back was about a foot away from one wall of the cafe, and his right shoulder was about a foot away from another wall.

He was tucked away right in the corner of the room.

He was facing along the length of one wall, the one just next to him, while his helper sat just beside him on his left.

The entrance to the cafe was on the far wall a dozen or so meters to his left.

This meant that his helper blocked any line of sight between him and anyone standing in the doorway or on the left side of the room in general.

Additionally, since the opening of his hood faced along the length of the wall next to him, if anyone tried to shatter all of his identity protections using Search despite the unbelievable blow to their reputation that that would entail with so many witnesses around, they could not effectively do so without standing directly in front of him.

They could not snipe him from across the room, in other words.

If his Mask ability somehow went down, then the side of his hood would still ensure his face would not be seen unless someone was standing right in front of him.

But he could simply spin around and face the corner of the cafe right behind him in this case, ensuring that his face was still hidden.

And if they were in front of him and this happened, and he had no time to whirl around to prevent his face from being seen, he could literally slam his face into the table in an instant as a last resort, hiding his face from view, and buying himself enough time to teleport out with the teleport crystal that he had hotkeyed.

He had gotten used to dealing with the drastically reduced pain sensing that occurred within the game, which meant that typically stupid things to do like punching brick walls or slamming your face into a wooden table didn't hurt nearly as much as they should.

He'd end up back in the Town of Beginnings if he had to resort to this, the guard timer would start up again, and people would probably see him with a missing cursor and might try to track him down, but Kirito doubted that anyone could catch him on such short notice if he took off immediately upon arrival.

The strategic positioning of his shop, however, minimized the odds of these sorts of outcomes as much as possible.

But it was nice to know that even in the worst case scenario, there was still something that he could do. That he still had options.

He took extreme care to ensure that the opening of his hood did not deviate from its position facing straight ahead along the length of the wall.

He probably looked like a hooded mannequin, or a statue even, due to this complete lack of movement.

Since he could see through his own cloak from the inside with a passive ability, it was not necessary to physically turn around in an obvious way if he wanted to look around the room.

His cloak was baggy, and his Rigid Cloak ability ensured that any awkward shifting around he was doing inside was not noticeable to anyone near him.

So he could easily be staring right at the doorway to the cafe, way off on the left side of the room without anyone being able to tell, since it'd still look like he was still staring straight ahead.

It would always look that way no matter where he was actually looking, or where his head was actually turned.

This was also how he had been able to notice his observer, he suspected.

Argo's spy had probably looked at the opening of Kirito's hood and figured that it was not possible to be seen from the angle of it, not anticipating Kirito's ability to freely move his head within the cloak without anyone noticing, and his ability to see through the fabric.

And as a result, all of the signs that he had learned about in the beta that were indicative of a spy were very evident to him in this person watching him.

He'd even go so far as to call the spy observing him a bit of an amateur.

Kirito tuned back into the conversation next to him.

"So are you here to buy any ovules?" Timely asked the impatient player in front of them.

"How much do you want?"

"It says right on the sign."

"Not that! How much do you want for the information on where you are getting all of these ovules?"

"More than you have."

"Give me a number."

"A billion cor."

"What?!"

Kirito blinked inside his hood.

If you got all remaining 8,000 players in the game to pool together all of their money, you still probably wouldn't get to a billion. Not this soon in the game.

On second thought…

Kirito considered his own cash stack for a moment.

He had become a millionaire two days ago. He made over 6 million just yesterday alone. And another few million today.

If there were a decent amount of other people like him, you might actually make it. It'd be close…

But it really depended on how many whales existed in the game.

Whales of course, referred to the tiny percentage of players who accumulated vast amounts of wealth, only to never do anything with it. The players who just accumulated more and more, and only spent any money as a means to further increase their wealth through flipping, merchanting, or investing.

There were probably a few absolutely stupidly rich whales out there somewhere that he just didn't know about yet.

A billion cor may be possible.

"Get serious!"

"I'm deadly serious."

"You see this?" Timely Advice pointed at his face. "This is my serious face."

"Nobody has that much!"

"Well I guess that's unfortunate then. Looks like you won't be buying that information."

Kirito grinned again.

He had been doing that a lot recently.

Timely had some great one liners, and could handle the chaos around him just fine. Kirito didn't need to say anything with a helper like this on his side. It was all under control.

With that thought, he let his mind wander off again.

Hang on a minute…

This couldn't be a trap for orange players.

Or if it was, it wasn't thought out properly.

If this market's location was meant to lure out orange players due to its location indoors, then it would only work on players who did not possess the Hide skill.

Orange players without that skill wouldn't be able to make it there at all, though.

It was actually pretty tricky getting in and out of the cafe he was in, given his current situation. It took a good deal more effort than most people would probably expect.

The cafe was crowded when he got there. And today, a lot of people had been waiting for him specifically to arrive since he had told a bunch of people yesterday about it.

The last time he ever intended to publicly speak.

He had had to wait in an alley under his full camouflage for an opening in the crowd to sneak through the doorway without anyone noticing.

It had actually been a pretty unnerving experience doing so as well.

Maintaining full invisibility while you are nearly shoulder to shoulder with other players in a crowd was difficult, but not due to the amount of people in the area. It was actually pretty surprising how few people looked your way when you were in the middle of a crowd. There were so few in fact, that it was easily possible to remain completely invisible. So even though there were so many people around him at the time, his camouflage had stayed up.

The part that was actually challenging was not bumping into anyone, as that would reveal himself instantly.

But he had waited for the proper moment, he had planned ahead, and he had slipped inside easily enough.

Leaving however, was much more challenging.

How do you get out of the building discreetly when you are a well known merchant with very valuable and exclusive information that some players would kill to have?

How do you do that successfully while keeping the fact that you are hiding your cursor with an ability, secret?

It was obvious that all kinds of people had every intention of following him as soon as he tried to leave the building.

And he couldn't just activate his camouflage in front of all of those people. It would give away just how much he had levelled up the ability, and he wanted to keep everything he could do as much of a secret as possible.

So Kirito had had to come up with a sleight of hand magic trick to avoid suspicion.

It was actually pretty clever, if he did say so himself…

It was such a simple solution.

He'd leave via teleportation. But he wanted to ensure that nobody ever found out about his Ring of Acid. So he made it look like he was using a teleport crystal, even though he wasn't.

So he would activate his ring very subtly a few minutes in advance of when he intended to leave, and wait for the teleport activation timer to run out. Then he would pull out his teleport crystal in the final few seconds before the actual teleportation with his ring occurred, and reveal it to the room in such a way that anyone in front of him could easily see it.

They would see him pull out the crystal and think: ' _looks like he's teleporting back to the starting city with that crystal.'_

Everyone knew that teleport crystals existed in the game. There was just no easy way to get them yet. So they were items held almost exclusively by the rich, since there were so few of them in the game. But you could occasionally find one being sold in the market he was in, if you spent some time looking for one.

So the people observing him pull out this teleport crystal wouldn't think much of it. They'd think that he was just another rich player leaving the building in such a way as to not be followed. It was a common practice, actually.

Then the thing that would actually teleport him out of the building, his ring, would finish activating just as he lowered his teleport crystal out of view from all of the spectators once again.

That was the most important part of the trick, subtle as it was.

Since he wasn't actually using the crystal to leave, it wouldn't actually shatter in his hand as it activated. So it had to be out of view in the final moments before the teleportation animation began, to prevent anyone from noticing this subtle detail.

If he vanished with an intact teleportation crystal in his hand, in full view of the spectators, an astute observer could potentially notice that something strange was going on.

But the stars had basically aligned for him in this instance. All of the little details that might have conceivably given this trick away, ended up working for him instead.

The animation from his Ring of Acid as it teleported him to the boss Nepenthe was identical to the animation of using a teleport crystal. The typical blue flash. So he didn't have to worry about any unique green flash or something else that would have shown to everyone in the area that he had definitely not used a crystal to create that effect, and was instead using a different teleportation item.

He had actually tested this out a few days back, by teleporting with that ring while staring down at a stream near his cave. Before disappearing, the water had acted as a good enough mirror for him to see what the animation looked like.

And then there was the default teleport. The final detail that made all of this possible.

Normally, when using a crystal, you had to verbally announce where you were teleporting to. But Kirito, naturally, didn't want to talk out loud. It would ruin his facade and who knows? Argo may recognize his voice or something…

It had already been a risk speaking at the end of the previous day, and at the end of his first day to tell everyone he was coming back.

But if you didn't do this… if you didn't verbally announce your destination upon teleporting, then the crystal would still teleport you, it would just select the default teleport location instead, which was always the starting city on the first floor.

So when he used his crystal without speaking, it would be understood by his spectators that he was teleporting to the Town of Beginnings, even if he didn't specifically say so, because that was the default, and it was also the only teleport location currently unlocked. You could only teleport to a city with a teleport gate inside it, after all. And only one such city existed on each floor of Aincrad, making the Town of Beginnings the only target currently available for those crystals.

Then, after teleporting with his ring, he could simply pretend that he had given the slip to all of the players waiting in the Town of Beginnings for this exact moment. The ones that were undoubtedly waiting for him to arrive there so that they could try to tail him to see where he went.

He had no doubt that those players existed.

But it was a crowded city. Surely none of them would notice that he'd never actually arrived. They would probably think that he was just really good at blending in with crowds, rather than assume that something else had happened.

But the main point to all of this, and the main reason why it all meant that this couldn't be a trap for orange players, was that this all took a lot of effort. If Kirito did not have the Hide skill maxed out, he couldn't get in and out of the building freely.

He was almost certain that it was impossible for an orange player to set up a shop in the building at all, unless they had the specific items and skills that Kirito had on him at the moment.

His ring was needed to get him out of the building without being followed. His teleport crystal was needed to cover up the fact that he had a ring at all. His Cursor hiding ability hid him from any possible orange cursor exception mechanic that may or may not exist in the game's code for hiding cursors when indoors, and he needed Hide maxed out to have a strong enough camouflage to be totally invisible even when in the middle of a crowd of people.

If an orange player didn't have even one of those things, none of it would work. Or it would at least be much more difficult to manage it.

So it couldn't be a trap to lure out orange players, because an orange player couldn't even get into the building unless they were immune to the trap entirely.

"Hey!"

Kirito tuned back into the conversation when a new voice entered it.

An annoyed customer from further back in the line finally shouted at the player trying to buy information from him and his current business partner.

It would seem that some of the other customers were getting annoyed at the hold up in the line.

"What do you want?" the annoying customer said, turning to face the protester.

"Buy an ovule or get the hell out of the line! People are waiting!"

"Yeah!" another voice agreed. "Hurry the hell up!"

"Shut up!" the annoying man replied. "This doesn't concern any of you!"

"Oh it doesn't, does it?" a giant of a man said as he walked out from the crowd of waiting players.

He was huge, and Kirito honestly wondered what someone like him was doing playing a game like Sword Art Online. He had to be close to 7 feet tall, and close to 250 pounds.

The giant closed the distance and walked right up to the guy holding up the line. "Last I checked some pipsqueak loudmouth was preventing me from getting my sword."

The annoying player audibly gulped, but managed to keep a straight face.

"Ooooooooooooh, it's on now!" a player further back called out, seeing the scene play out.

"Kick his ass, big dude!"

Kirito raised a single eyebrow in confusion after seeing all of this. Was there seriously about to be a fight over this? That was new.

He wasn't really worried about it though. Nobody could hurt each other in a safe zone. But fighting was still discouraged anyway due to the anti-harassment code that allowed instigators to be sent to the in-game jail.

The player holding up the line took a good look at the intimidating player before him and quickly seemed to grasp the situation he was in.

He would have thought that the crowd would be on his side. On the side of trying to figure out how a single merchant had gotten their hands on so many of these priceless ovules. But apparently, many of these players just wanted their sword so that they could be on their way and didn't really care all that much about such details.

After reading the crowd, he huffed in annoyance, and glared at Timely, the one doing all the talking for the nameless merchant.

"I will get that info," were his last words, as he stormed out of the room.

Kirito watched him leave. It hadn't been the first player to say that to him, and it probably wouldn't be the last either.

He'd just make sure to be extra careful when leaving the cafe, later.

A cheer ran through the crowd of players watching all of this play out, and the line started moving again.

"Hey, big guy!" the player who was now supposed to be at the front of line spoke up.

"Hm?" the giant replied.

"You're up next," he said with a gesture, giving up his spot in line.

"You serious?"

"Yeah! That was awesome, dude! It's the least I can do."

"Thanks."

As a courtesy, the guy in the front of the line let the huge player that had sorted out the situation cut in front of him.

Then it was back to business as usual.

* * *

Noon eventually hit, and as expected, the crowd thinned out.

Ironically, the cafe they were in was barely used at all for actually eating.

Kirito could only imagine what the NPCs that owned the place had to be thinking.

All of these players just waltz into their cafe one day and set up a market inside, and then nobody buys any food from them. Instead, most of these players choose to go to other restaurants in the area. In fact, many of the players that used this place as a market probably didn't even know that there was a cafe in the place at all.

These players had basically just taken over the building without permission, and had to be killing the business of the actual cafe owners in the process.

That's what would have been happening if this were real life anyway.

But the fact that they hadn't all been collectively kicked out by the NPC shopkeeper showed that things worked differently in this world.

The NPCs probably weren't programmed to care about such things.

Kirito still thought that the idea was pretty funny though. He'd have been outraged if this were his cafe, and he were presented with this situation.

But anyways…

The time had finally arrived for him to initiate the next phase of his plan.

His helper had been correct about the fact that his current shop would eventually die out after the Anneal Blade rush ended, and it was time to address that issue.

So Kirito waited in silence for a few minutes, hoping for a moment where he could start a conversation with Timely without drawing the attention of anyone else.

Eventually, his moment arrived.

"Thanks for all the help," Kirito said, breaking his silence.

Timely Advice understood for the most part, why Kirito hadn't been speaking and was pretty unfazed by it. Apparently, a lot of anonymous players were exactly the same in that regard, so it wasn't seen as unusual for someone in his position.

"Hm? Don't worry about it. The pay's been great."

The two of them were still sitting next to each other in the corner of the cafe. Kirito was leaning back in his chair while his helper Timely had his feet propped up on the table.

One of the small aspects of the fact that they were in a virtual world that he was grateful for was the lack of common annoyances like cramps and small pains due to sitting down on hard surfaces or in weird positions. The soreness that you would typically feel in the real world after sitting on a hard seat for half a day wasn't present at all.

As a result, neither of them felt any need to stand up or stretch their legs.

"I have another offer for you later if you're interested," Kirito stated.

"I think you already know what my answer to that will be."

"Yeah, I think I can imagine."

Timely made it pretty clear that he only really cared about money.

"But anyways," Kirito continued, "Before that, do you happen to know of any decent merchants that would be willing to deal with a player like me?"

"Oh man. There's a ton of them," his helper replied. "I probably couldn't name one for you off the top of my head, but I've got a list of them, actually."

That was certainly convenient.

"A list?" Kirito asked.

"Yeah, hang on a sec."

Kirito watched as his helper opened up his menu, and started going through his inventory. A moment or two later, an object materialized in his helper's hand.

"Yeah, so I deal with a lot of them, as I'm sure you can imagine," His helper said. "It's kinda what I do. Since I'm almost always only employed by anons like yourself, and not all merchants are willing to deal with such players, the ones that are, I see pretty regularly."

He technically worked as a middleman for trades between players. However, it turned out that most people that needed such a service were either people with extremely valuable items in their possession, people who could potentially have hitmen hired to take them from them, or people that just didn't want to be known because they didn't like attention.

In either of those cases, the player would almost always hide their identity.

And as a result, he would regularly have to facilitate transactions between these anonymous players and public merchants whenever the anon wanted to start buying or selling things in bulk. Something that couldn't really be done by trading with single players.

"So naturally," he continued, "I made a list of them."

"Anyway, here it is," he said, handing the list to Kirito. "It's in alphabetical order, so it's not sorted by importance or anything like that. So take your pick. Everyone there will be more than happy to work with you on your terms. Especially with how much of an impact you've been making recently."

Kirito scanned the list, but didn't recognize any names. He hadn't dealt with many merchants in the past, though, so he wasn't really sure who he was even looking for.

After another moment or two, Kirito decided to just pick someone at random. For convenience, he just picked the person that appeared at the top of the list.

Agil.

"So where can I find this Agil? You know him?" Kirito asked.

"Agil? Yeah I know him," his helper replied.

"Big guy," he explained, "Can be pretty scary sometimes. Super friendly though."

"You want to meet him?" he asked. "I can probably set something up."

"In fact, I probably already know what you're thinking," Timely claimed. "It's a good idea. He'll be down for it."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah. It's a win-win-win. You free up some time, Agil does what he does best, and I get paid."

"Sounds good to me. He can make contracts?"

"Yeah. Everyone on that list can."

"Alright, that works for me. How soon can you set this up?"

"Does tonight work for you?"

"Tonight? That's pretty fast."

"Yeah, he'll make the time for someone like you if you've got the time to spare."

"That works for me."

"Cool. I'll send him a message right now."

"Alright, thanks."

Kirito had briefly considered trying to find an NPC merchant that would work with an orange player, but figured that this would just be easier. That, and he wasn't sure if such NPC merchants existed.

But since anonymous players seemed to be more common now than they had been in the beta due to everyone having their real faces on display, a player merchant looked like a better option for what he had in mind. They wouldn't look at an anonymous player with suspicion, necessarily.

As long as he was super careful about how the contract he wanted to set up was created, and he never met either this Agil or his helper in any outdoors setting, and didn't make it obvious that he was doing so, everything should work out.

* * *

"Ugh! That stupid jerk! When I get my hands on him, I swear to god!"

' _What the hell is going through his head?!'_

Argo was livid. She had been in a terrible mood all day. And the previous day. It had actually carried over from two days ago, ever since her favourite solo player had muted her.

Her!

' _Who does he think he is?!'_

 _Nobody_ mutes Argo. It just didn't happen.

' _I'm the one who mutes! Not other people! Me!'_

It had caught her completely off guard. Never in a million years did she think that Kirito, of all people, would dare to try something like that with her. Not without at least talking to her about it first! She didn't even know why he did it!

Well… maybe she had sent him one too many friend requests… But he should have accepted long ago!

When the death game had started after Kayaba's announcement, she had understood why Kirito hadn't accepted her requests immediately. At least, for the first little while.

It had made some sense to her after she had thought about it for a bit, after all of her attempts had failed. Even though it had irritated the crap out of her when she figured out what the reason probably was.

It was ironic, really. She was the one with the moniker of "The Rat,' but Kirito really fit that description himself in his own way.

Well... she actually thought that he was more like a cute little mouse than a rat.

Because every time he was even remotely threatened, he would just drop everything and go AWOL. Simply vanishing. Sometimes for days at a time.

And then it would take ages for him to finally peek his head out again from whatever corner he had hidden himself in after things had finally calmed down a little.

As a result, she had carefully crafted the skill of slowly easing him out of his hidey hole whenever he had gotten a little too spooked for one reason or another.

When she was finally baiting him out in a situation like that, she couldn't be too pushy or aggressive. She also had to tone down the teasing a little, or else he could run off again.

It was a careful balancing act that she had had to pull off a couple of times in the past.

And she thought it was adorable… most of the time, anyways.

But the whole death game thing had probably caused the same thing to happen.

So for a couple of days, even a week, she could come to terms with the fact that he'd simply be off the radar, god knows where.

Frustrating, sure, but understandable.

But then he was supposed to come out again, and he didn't.

And then another week had passed. And then another.

It was around that third week that she had really started to get worried. Something huge had to have happened for him to have been out of contact with her for so long. She was always the first person he'd speak to every time he came out of hiding.

It just wasn't like him to be gone for that long.

She had even taken to routinely checking the Monument of Life just to make sure that he was still alive.

And then the jerk had muted her!

Just... out of the blue! She heard nothing from him for weeks, and then all of a sudden she gets the system alert telling her that she can't send any more messages to him!

He had certainly never done that to her before!

And it drove her right up the freaking wall! Didn't he know how worried she had been about him this whole time?

She was going to have words with that jerk when she finally managed to track him down.

And she _would_ track him down. She'd find him and get some answers if it was the last thing she did.

She had sent some of her spies out during that first week and they had been searching ever since. But dammit, he must have found one hell of a deep hole because she hadn't heard so much as a peep from anyone about his whereabouts.

That was one of the most amazing, but also frustrating things about him.

He was without a doubt the closest friend she had made in the beta, but when he tried to Hide, dammit did he hide well.

Way too well for his own good. So well that even she couldn't figure out where he was most of the time.

Argo let out a frustrated sigh.

"God dammit Ki-bou, couldn't you have just told me what was going on? I could have helped."

It hurt her a good deal more than she liked to admit, that he apparently didn't trust her with whatever had happened. That he had thought that it was best to simply leave her out of it.

And she couldn't help herself whenever her mind turned in that direction. Her thoughts would always lead her down the path towards all of her previous interactions with him.

Had she said something during the beta that had offended him, and he just hadn't said anything about it at the time? Had she hurt him somehow without realizing? Did she make some sort of mistake?

He had never directly said anything, or even hinted to her about anything along those lines. But maybe she had taken her teasing a little bit too far one time without realizing it?

She had no idea.

She really just wanted her friend back, though.

Abruptly, she received a message, and she was forced out of her thoughts.

She was laying on her back, spread-eagled and facing the ceiling, in the bed of her newly rented room.

Her sleep schedule had gone out of whack due to pulling a few too many all-nighters, so even though it wasn't even 5pm yet, she was ready for bed.

She had just been laying awake, trying to make herself fall asleep, when the message had alerted her.

It was from one of her contacts.

Opening her menu, she quickly read it over.

She had something like two dozen projects that she was working on, all simultaneously.

She had so much on her plate that she was pretty much mentally capped out. As much as she was currently doing, she had a massive backlog of even more projects that she hadn't been able to even start yet. Enough to keep her busy for months, easily.

But currently, she had people looking for her friend, though she hadn't really specified to them that that was who she was looking for. She had really just told them to check out certain locations that she could see Kirito being drawn to without telling them why.

Then she had people simply exploring the floor, trying to make maps of all of the dungeons and hidden ruins.

Then she had a team looking for the boss room.

She had people constantly looking for new information so that she could release her next, updated version of the guidebook.

She was constantly recruiting new people to expand her information network.

Then of course, she had to deal with all of the people that were her actual customers, looking to buy and sell information from her. Which was sort of how she made her living...

Then there were about 20 or so mysterious players that were all worth looking into, either for finding something interesting, whether that was a rare item that hadn't been seen in the beta, or because they had stumbled upon some new ability, or because they were just unbelievably strong for being so early in the game...

This so-called 'Hooded Demon' that had allegedly cleared out a Nepenthe horde after a fruit had burst was just the latest one of those…

It was such a stupid moniker. Which ironically, was probably why it ended up sticking…

It had been coined by one of the players who had allegedly witnessed this player in action in that forest. One of the players who would have died had that player not intervened. But the stupid name was clearly an attempt to turn the whole thing into a legend. So not much real information was available, since there were already so many exaggerated rumours out there already.

But if even some of those rumours about this player's strength were true, it would put that person squarely in the rank 1 position in terms of strength of all known players in the game so far… So she had people looking into that, too.

Then there was a merchant that had shown up in the player market in Tolbana that had an apparently endless supply of those ovules, and was currently causing havoc in the economy by introducing so many Anneal Blades into the game, completely upsetting the power balance between the different types of players.

It was getting to the point that if you weren't using one of those swords, then you were limited in the speed at which you could level up, since there was no corresponding Anneal Blade for polearms, axes, or any of the other weapon types widely available.

That one merchant, as a result, was changing the meta of the game single handedly, and not everyone was happy about it.

She had hired people to look for this source of ovules as a result, since this merchant currently had a monopoly on the supply, but she had so far come up empty. She had even started to consider the possibility of an item duplication glitch existing, so she had prioritized this particular project to find out what was actually going on…

But she also had to consider this being an actual legitimate source of ovules that she just hadn't found yet, so she was pursuing other possibilities as well.

One of which was just a hunch of hers. That Hooded Demon guy that had shown up, if he even existed at all, because that was still unconfirmed, had apparently been a master of killing those Nepenthes, which had immediately lead her, and many others, to believe that there might have been some sort of connection between that person and that merchant in Tolbana, so she had people trying to look into that as well…

Maybe they were part of the same guild or something...

But coincidentally enough, the player she had hired to observe this merchant had been the one to just message her.

And he had just told her that he had managed to get exactly nothing out of him. Which naturally, served to irritate her a great deal.

She was so not in the mood for this.

' _Really? You got nothing at all?'_

' _Yeah. Sorry. The guy was a statue. Didn't so much as twitch, all day.'_

Argo let out a frustrated sigh, before typing out her next reply.

' _Okay, thanks for the help anyways. It was worth a try.'_

' _Do you want me to try again tomorrow?'_

Argo thought about it for a moment before deciding.

' _Is he showing up again tomorrow?'_

' _Well, he didn't say he wasn't. And the guy helping him with his trades didn't say he wasn't. Judging by the number of people that still want one of those ovules though, he'd be stupid to not show up. Unless he ran out of them, or something. '_

' _And he already left?'_

' _Yeah, he took off about 5 minutes ago. He used a teleport crystal to leave, and I couldn't find him when I tried to follow him. People are trying to question his assistant right now. But judging by the way he's been deflecting inquiries all day, it's unlikely that anyone is going to get any information out of him. You know how that guy is.'_

She did indeed. One of those annoying, stubborn types that was simply immovable. Unwilling to back down or compromise on anything. She knew that she would have to pay an outrageous amount of cor to get someone like him to cough anything up. And with a merchant as wealthy as that guy's current employer was, even that probably wouldn't be enough.

She was pretty well off, all things considered, but she was almost certain that she wouldn't be able to sway that guy with money alone. Anything she offered could be easily doubled by that anonymous merchant. They probably even had an agreement set up along those lines.

' _If someone tries to pay you to rat me out,'_ the merchant had probably said to his unreasonably stubborn assistant, ' _just remember, I'll double it.'_

Argo simply couldn't compete with that. She wasn't a whale that could afford to get into a bidding war.

' _Don't worry about trying again tomorrow,'_ she decided.

' _You sure?'_

' _Yeah. I'll go myself.'_

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	13. Preparations

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

"So you're this merchant I've been hearing so much about?" Agil asked as the meeting began.

Kirito had gotten into the building easily enough, and everything had gone according to plan. He had snuck into the building when nobody was looking, at the agreed upon time, and so the knowledge of his cursor colour remained undiscovered by the other two players there.

"Something like that," Kirito replied.

"I gotta say. You've been making a lot of waves."

"I'm aware. Though hopefully, things will go a little more smoothly after this meeting."

"Alright. Well let's get right down to it then. What is it specifically that you're after?"

"I have better things to do than sit around in front of a shop all day. Sure I'm making some decent money, but I have other priorities."

"That's interesting. So you're not a merchant? What might those priorities be?"

"Sorry. I'm afraid those are things I don't intend to speak about."

"Fair enough. I suppose I should have guessed something like that given the fact that you're playing anonymously."

That was one of the great things about being an anonymous player. You could be incredibly secretive about what you were doing, and what your goals were, and nobody would think of it as suspicious. Nobody would be accusing him of being orange based on just that.

"So how do you intend to do this then?" Agil asked.

"The usual. I'm sure you've made deals just like it before. I want to set up a contract between you and my assistant Timely Advice here, as a middleman," Kirito explained as he gestured to the player standing next to him. "I give the ovules to him, he gives them to you, you sell them, give the profits back to Timely, who will drop trade them back to me."

"Both of you will naturally get a cut."

There was no way as far as he knew, to set up an anonymous contract. So the extra step here with his assistant was necessary if he wanted to keep his identity hidden. This was the main reason why people like Timely Advice were needed at all. Anonymous players had to work around the system by getting other people to buy and sell items for them. It was just another one of those inconveniences that he'd have to live with.

These types of contracts, when in place, allowed trades to happen over long distances, and could even allow them to be automated so long as the person who had written them up had the specific skills that Agil did. They also prevented players from needing to make these trades in person. So, Timely Advice could, at any moment, simply drag and drop any ovule he ever got his hands on into a special menu no matter where he was in the world, and Agil would receive it. And the same worked for the profits that Agil would be sending back. And it was all overseen by the system itself, to make it impossible for either player to cheat.

"And you're okay with this?" Agil directed his question at Timely Advice.

"Yeah. Why wouldn't I be? I've done this before."

"It's just that I'm surprised, is all. Mister merchant here is putting you in a position where you can completely screw him over at any time. If he dumps a bunch of ovules on you, and you just turn around and run with them, that's a lot of money that you'd get away with."

"How is that different from any other deal I've made?" Timely asked. "It's my job to be a middleman for trades like this. I'd never turn and run. Since everyone knows me, I'd never be able to get away with something like that."

"This time it's different, though," Agil replied. "I can safely say that this deal will generate more cor than any other contract made in the game so far by a huge margin. You absolutely could get away with it since you'd have enough money after to live out the rest of your time in this game without ever having to raise a finger. Sure you'd have to be careful about it, but a million cor can last a long time if you carefully budget it out over a few years. But you'd never have to deal with anyone else ever again, so a ruined reputation wouldn't actually set you back all that much."

"I have a way to get more ovules, though," Kirito explained. "Say I give him 200 ovules and he runs off with them. I'll just go and get another 200 and undercut whatever he tries to sell his stolen ones for until he runs out. I actually don't have very many on me at any one time. I have to get more every morning. It's not like I have thousands of them that I'm going to be giving him in a single trade. This will be a longer term arrangement where I will be giving him more and more as time goes on."

"Where can you possibly get so many of those things from?" Agil asked.

"You don't actually expect me to answer that, do you?"

"No, I guess not."

"As far as I know, I'm the only one who has an endless source of them," Kirito continued. "So it wouldn't really matter to me if you did try something like that, Timely. Not that I think you would or anything."

"I definitely wouldn't," Timely said. "But anyway, why are we even having this conversation at all, Agil? As far as I can tell, you aren't the final arbiter on whether or not this deal goes through or not. We don't need your permission. If you have a problem with it, we'll just find someone else who doesn't."

"Alright, alright, fine. Sorry," Agil sheepishly apologized. "I just wanted to make sure you were all aware of the risks, is all."

"I appreciate that," Kirito replied. "But we wouldn't be doing this if we weren't. I've had this deal in mind for a while."

At some point, Kirito was going to have to start taking risks trusting other people with his money. Trying to do absolutely everything in the game himself wasted so much time. His wild goose chase across the entire floor for a simple bar glass had proven that.

"Alrighty, then. I guess we should get this thing set up. How do you want to do it?" Agil asked.

"You should have full control over the price, Agil," Timely explained. "We're pretty sure it will start dropping rapidly once more people get their hands on the Anneal Blade. So since you will be the one doing all of the selling, you would be in the best position to know what the price should be."

"I've been making… what?" Timely thought aloud. "300 cor per trade currently? What does that work out to as a percentage? We've been selling them at 14,000."

"Something like 2.1 percent, I think," Kirito concluded after some quick mental math.

"Yeah, that sounds about right," Agil replied, punching in the numbers himself on his menu to confirm.

Calculators did exist in SAO, but annoyingly, not everyone could use them. Tools like those could only be accessed if you picked up certain skills related to owning businesses, or being a merchant. And even then, the calculators involved were just simple number crunchers. There was probably a way to get access to some more advanced software that allowed for the creation of spreadsheets, but Kirito wasn't sure. It probably involved maxing out one of the merchant skills, or something. He had been having to rely on his slightly above average mental math abilities all this time, along with SAO's notepad feature that all players could access, to do any basic algebra he needed to do.

"Want to use the same rate with this contract?" Agil asked.

"Sure," Timely agreed. "Two percent is pretty much the standard for expensive items like this, anyways."

"Is that right?" Kirito asked. "That feels low to me."

"It is actually pretty low if you want to get technical. Especially if you try to compare it to anything in the real world, but the important thing to remember is that when this contract is in place, everything is pretty much automated by the system. I'll be getting that money simply for trading with Agil every now and then, and of course, drop trading with you. It requires almost no work."

"I actually already have a few other contracts with other clients like you, and I'm getting crazy amounts of money passively from them since they all add up," Timely continued. "So 2% is actually pretty reasonable. I don't have to do anything and the money just shows up in my inventory whenever something sells."

"That sounds like a pretty good deal," Kirito replied. And besides, who was he to complain if Timely wasn't going to be taking as much of his money as he had originally expected?

"Oh, absolutely," Timely agreed. "I would definitely recommend it. I've found a way to monetize anonymous players."

Kirito grinned. His helper was such a greedy bastard.

"And what's the standard for merchants?" Kirito asked.

It was clear that the two other players he was currently with knew a lot more about these sorts of things than he did. And they didn't seem like the type of people to try to rip him off. So he'd defer to them.

"It varies a lot depending on the contract," Timely explained. "But since Agil is going to be controlling the price and doing most of the work, something like 20% is probably appropriate."

"Yeah, I'll take 20," Agil agreed.

"Really?" Kirito couldn't help but ask. "That also seems low to me."

"Why's that?" Agil replied.

"You're the one dealing with the customers right? That's pretty much all the work," Kirito explained. "You have to sit here in your shop all the time while we run off doing other things." Kirito had honestly thought that he'd be paying at least 50% to the man. So he was genuinely surprised that the number was so low.

Agil laughed.

"That's exactly what a merchant is."

Well then, if that wasn't the most depressing thing Kirito had heard all day, he didn't know what was.

"Huh. I've never heard an entire profession get reduced to something so menial, before," Kirito replied.

"It's not so bad," Agil said. "Especially when I spend a lot of time meeting people like yourself. Working my own hours isn't such a bad deal either."

"I guess not. It certainly isn't what I'd consider a good time, though."

It only took a few more minutes for Agil to finish setting up the contract. When they were all finished, and had all agreed on the details, Kirito and Timely walked over towards the main room of the building after a quick goodbye to Agil.

They had tested everything out, and everything worked as expected. This would take a massive burden off of Kirito's shoulders, and would allow him to actually play the game again. He now had a source of income, and two people to help him spend it. Opening up his inventory, Kirito then drop-traded 200 ovules to his assistant to sell over the next few days.

* * *

"So I've got another deal for you if you're interested," Kirito offered his assistant, as they stood in the doorway of Agil's shop after the meeting concluded. They were still technically inside the building, so the knowledge of Kirito's cursor was still safe.

"Is that right?" Timely asked, clearly interested.

"Yeah. I need someone to buy some things from the player market. Same setup work for you?" Since not everyone allowed drop trades when they were selling items, and they were so inconvenient for buying in bulk, he needed to use Timely as a middleman again. His assistant would buy them conventionally, and then sell them to him at a markup.

"Yeah," Timely agreed. "2% per trade?"

"Yeah."

"Alright. What do you need?"

"Here's a list." Kirito quickly opened his menu and gave Timely a carefully prepared list containing all of the items he expected to need for his boss fight against Illfang.

"Holy…!" Timely looked at Kirito in disbelief after seeing it.

It was a pretty lengthy list, after all.

"A thousand health potions? Ten fully upgraded Anneal Blades? A thousand full sets of combat potions? Are you crazy? Are you trying to build an army or something?"

Pretty much. The boss fight would take hours, easily. And while Kirito had managed to keep his first Anneal Blade for a very long time without ever needing to repair it, this was entirely due to the fact that he had been fighting against Nepenthes with it at the time. Monsters that did not use metal tools, weapons, or have any hardened armour, or shell. All of those things would drastically increase the rate at which a player's weapons would get damaged throughout the battle. He was planning on fighting against a floor boss now. One with a giant cleaver that would tear his equipment to pieces with ease every single time he parried or otherwise clashed blades.

This effect usually was too small to matter when in a large raid group with tons of other players, but that was only because the duration of the fight was so short in those cases. And that was the thing that was making this plan of his so unbelievably costly. The longer the fight went on, the more his equipment would degrade. A single weapon wouldn't be enough since he could not repair it mid-battle.

So he would have to rotate them out. Every time one of his swords was finished, he'd have to switch it out with a new one. He didn't want to completely destroy his weapons, however, on the off-chance that he would find a way to repair them in the future. He had learned his lesson from losing his first Anneal Blade like that.

This degradation effect was also present for any armour he happened to have on. However, since he expected to dodge most attacks from the boss, his armour would not take nearly the same amount of damage as his weapons would. Since his armour would not be taking direct impacts from anything metallic at all unless he did something wrong.

If he burned through the set of armour he intended to use, he would have taken so much damage that he'd either be dead, or would have had to teleport out and call off the attempt as a failure. So he didn't really need too many sets of them.

Then there was the matter of his HP. Kirito wanted roughly the same amount as the boss. Since his bar was too small for this, he'd have to store the rest inside hundreds of health potions. Illfang would also be passively regenerating throughout the entire battle. So over the course of several hours, this would equate to a full extra bar or two that Kirito would have to compensate for.

He wanted enough HP to give himself a margin of error. He expected to screw up a lot during the fight due to stupid mistakes and the possibility of running into unexpected surprises that hadn't been present back in the beta. And even though he could avoid most direct hits with his natural speed and acrobatic ability, that wasn't the only source of damage he would be taking.

It was the AOE that was playing the most significant factor. Illfang's weapons were so large that whenever they impacted an area near where he was standing, Kirito would be damaged from the shockwave. It wouldn't be much, and when in a raid party of players, the fight was usually over fast enough for this sort of damage to be ignored, but it would build up over time even if he dodged everything else.

He had estimated that he would be taking at minimum, 100,000 points of damage before it was over no matter what he did just because of all of this AOE damage build up. For reference, a new player at level 1 started with 250 HP. And this estimate was in the ideal, perfect scenario where he dodged everything else the boss threw his way. The theoretical lower limit of damage he expected to take given his current capabilities. A thousand health potions was enough to cover well over 10 times that amount of damage. It probably was a bit overkill, but he'd rather be over prepared than under.

In the future, he intended to learn how to make these types of potions himself. These one's Timely would be picking up were currently the best available, but Kirito just didn't know the recipes.

Then, of course, he needed 1,000 full sets of combat potions. There were a ton of varieties of potions that most players could take just before any kind of serious confrontation. These included defence boosters, STR and AGI enhancers, damage enhancers, anti paralytics, anti poisons, luck potions, regen potions, and a whole bunch of others.

The optimal ratio depending on the planned confrontation was what players referred to as a set, so it could change depending on what you were fighting and Kirito had estimated that 1,000 of them should be enough.

He was prioritizing DPS above everything. Though his setup would probably seem a bit unusual to any other elite player since he was pushing hard into AGI boosts. STR potions were almost universally considered more important in a boss battle, but due to Kirito's unique fighting style, he was obviously an exception.

An AGI boost would drastically increase the speed of the tip of his sword during his spins. Due to the way the game's physics engine worked, this would provide a greater boost to his DPS than a simple STR boost would. Kinetic energy equalled (1 / 2) m*v^2, which meant that the energy of an impact increased faster by scaling up the speed of the strike, when compared to increasing the mass of the weapon. Since STR potions were analogous to this, AGI would provide a greater damage boost, but only when taking advantage of the game's physics engine the way Kirito would be.

Though to be fair, there was a bit of an asterisk there. This idea greatly oversimplified all the variables involved. The full truth was likely much more complicated than that, but the idea itself made sense to him in principle.

Since most players fought bosses in parties, each with assigned objectives, there wasn't usually a whole lot of running and flipping across the boss room going on. Players were usually far more static when compared to what he would be doing, which meant that nobody else really benefited the way he would when taking an AGI boost, and why his potion setup would look weird to others.

He was also opting for the extremely expensive potions. The ones that were controversial due to their extremely short durations. They had much stronger effects than average, but few players were willing to put up with having to re-apply the effects every 30 seconds.

They expired too quickly, and a cost-benefit analysis almost never justified them. While having superior DPS made fights end sooner and saved equipment repair costs as a result, this usually didn't matter since you had to use too many in the end. An analysis of the full situation from the wealth of the monster drops you were expected to get, to the expected equipment maintenance costs after the fight, to the price of the consumables used during it, all had to be taken into account in advance to determine what potions you should be using. And it almost never went in favour of these ones.

Almost always, the poor-man's route was better. But Kirito had to get over that passive regeneration barrier, so he was attempting to squeeze out every last drop of DPS that he could in order to ensure that he'd be able to do so, no matter the cost. He was rich enough to handle it anyway.

It was going to be pretty rough having to drink so many potions, though. He'd have to constantly keep an eye on his cooldown timers and come up with some sort of potion drinking rotation to ensure he never lost any of his buffs.

Back in the beta, this had been why his elite party had had a dedicated potion runner. Someone who would keep track of all of this without forcing the front liners to have to. Things were so much simpler when you had a party member that knew exactly what potion you needed, just as the buff it would renew was about to expire.

Having to account for all of these details while in the middle of a fight was challenging, so most elected not to. But to get to the absolute pinnacle of DPS, it was necessary. Kirito's old party leader had created all sorts of spreadsheets back during the beta to investigate this effect. Comparing the loss of DPS from losing one party member outright to this logistical role, in order to allow all other party members to always be under the effects of the best potions available, even if they only had impractical '30 seconds or less,' durations on them.

It checked out. Kirito had seen the numbers himself, and had noticed a significant increase in his party's overall DPS after inventing and implementing this role. They had invented this strategy, and few had been able to replicate it since it was so precisely choreographed.

Now he would be expected to do all of it himself. If he couldn't damage the boss faster than it healed, he would never be able to win. But he'd have to do some extensive testing to make sure he could keep track of all of these details in an actual battle.

In theory he should be able to do it with all of the newly freed up slots on his hotbar from the abilities he had unlocked with his Hiding skill, but the real test would come when he finally got around to fighting the floor boss on his own.

He would have to maintain a razor sharp focus for potentially hours on end. And he'd be spending a huge portion of that focus on the logistics of keeping up with all of his potion timers instead of the actual fight itself.

"Or something," Kirito replied. There was no way he intended to explain any of the reasons why he was buying so many items out loud.

"I… won't be able to get all of this in one day."

"I understand. I'll give you a huge bonus if you get it all to me before the boss meeting though."

"Before the boss meeting? That's on the 2nd. It's the 30th now, though it won't be for long since it's evening already. So that gives me… what? A day and half? Two days then? How huge a bonus are we talking?"

Kirito quickly ran the numbers in his head. He could afford to give the guy a million cor for this. He had to beat that boss before anyone else could. It could very well cost him his life if he couldn't. He wouldn't be able to pull ahead of the rest of the player base with that huge lump of experience if he failed. And he wouldn't be able to become strong enough to solo other bosses in the future. He had to succeed. A million was worth it.

"A million if you get it to me by tomorrow morning. Say, before noon."

"A million…" Timely replied, astonished. "That's a lot of money."

"It is. That's in addition to the 2% rate as well, just to be clear."

"I can definitely try, but that'll be cutting it pretty close."

"I'll give you half that if you get it all to me by midnight tomorrow." Kirito really needed those items.

"That's an enticing offer. I'll do what I can. There's a bit of a problem though. I don't have the money to afford all of that. I'm pretty well off, but not that well off."

Kirito understood. Timely would need a large starting pool of cor to buy everything with.

"Then take this." Kirito gave him a bag full of a million cor. It was a big bag.

"Are you serious?" Timely asked. "You're just going to give this to me?"

"Yeah," Kirito said. "Use it to buy the stuff on that list. I don't care if you have to use every last bit of it, either. I don't care really, how much this ends up costing me in the end. Overpay if you have to. Bribe other players if you need to. Just get me the items on that list. If you run out of money, I'll give you more when we meet up again this evening to see how far along you are."

It may have been a risk to just hand over a million cor to him just like that, as Timely could literally just turn around and run with it, but this also served an important purpose. If his assistant instead used the money as Kirito had told him to, it would essentially prove that Timely was someone he could trust with his money once and for all. And it would also show his assistant that there was a high chance of even more lucrative deals in the future. It was a risk that Kirito would have to take eventually, so why not just get it over with now?

"I understand."

"If this works out, I have another few potential deals in mind for the future as well. You know. If you're interested in that sort of thing."

"I think you already know my answer to that. But yeah, alright. I'll see you later then."

"Good luck. I'll meet you at the market at about 10pm tonight."

"Cool."

* * *

Kirito ended up having a little bit of an internal debate with himself after that. What should he do in the meantime while his assistant was picking up all of that equipment?

He could go back to his cave to go grind some more Nepenthes. Make a little more progress towards that next ring upgrade. He'd have to come back soon, though. Alternatively, he could go and look for the boss room. He did have to find it at some point within the next two days if he wanted to stick to his plan. But he had all of tomorrow for that. It was a tricky situation. He had no way of knowing if the other players had found the boss room yet. And he couldn't know that until that boss meeting happened.

They had either found it or they hadn't. So he had to assume the worst case scenario when preparing his timeline. He had to assume that the boss meeting at noon in a little less than two days would involve revealing the location of the room, and an instant mobilization of all front line players to immediately go out and clear it.

If the meeting happened like that, and everyone moved as quickly as possible, Kirito estimated that they would all be grouped up in front of the boss room, prepared to fight, about two hours after the meeting.

Realistically, since many of the front line players that would be involved in a raid like this would be new and inexperienced, it was far more likely that they would take a few hours to prepare before setting out, but Kirito had to assume that they would move as quickly as possible to give himself the largest margin of error that he could. He did not want to be interrupted while he was fighting the boss.

It made him hope that the locking feature that existed in the beta was in this game as well. In the beta, there had been a switch on the inside of the boss room that would lock the door, preventing any other player from crashing a party's attempt at defeating the boss. Doing so would make it impossible to leave, however, unless you had a teleport crystal on you.

If the switch wasn't flipped, then anyone could enter or leave the room freely. Parties could jump into the fight when the boss was almost dead, and there had even been cases of players trying to snipe the last attack bonus like this. By lying in wait until the boss had barely any health left, before suddenly running into the room to try and steal the kill.

In this version of the game, Kirito was pretty sure that that feature wouldn't be used very often, though. It was probably seen as a good thing that reinforcements could freely arrive in the middle of a boss battle now because everyone's lives were at stake.

Of course, like in most things, Kirito was an exception here as well. Nothing would suck worse than spending eight hours whittling down the boss's health only to get crashed during the final minutes by a raid party of players. Everyone would also learn of his attempt to solo the boss, and everyone's attention would immediately be placed on him if this happened. So he had to finish the fight before the other players arrived.

But even if that switch did exist to lock the entrance, it would still be problematic if the raid party stumbled upon the boss room while he was fighting and found it locked. They would immediately know that someone was fighting the boss. This, while not as bad as someone watching him fight the boss himself, was still pretty bad.

In this case, he would be able to hide behind another layer of plausible deniability, though. If they were locked out, they wouldn't be able to tell that he was soloing the boss, specifically. When the doors opened after he won in this scenario, and they walked into the empty room, they would likely assume that a secret party of players had taken it down. They wouldn't suddenly start assuming that a single player had done it. This would only happen if his battle was actually seen by someone.

But the ideal situation was obviously that this switch existed, that he used it, and that he finished his fight with Illfang before the boss meeting even happened. Finishing up while all the players were in Tolbana having the meeting, or when they were all on their way over afterward was also allowed, but it was cutting it close.

So with all this in mind, Kirito could estimate that he had until 2pm on December 2nd to finish off the boss. That was the final deadline, which meant he had to be in the room early that morning. He had no idea how long the fight would take, but he guessed about 8 hours. That had been the number he had come with after an extensive calculation involving estimating Illfang's passive regeneration, the DPS loss from not having 40 other players with him, the increase in DPS that came with all of the boosts he'd be using, and many other things.

But he still needed to find the boss room, which could take a while. It could easily take another 6-8 hours, perhaps even longer if he was really unlucky. So Kirito didn't know what to expect during his search. It might just be better to do that later. He had to meet Timely at 10. It was almost 6 now, which only gave him 4 hours including travel time to and from the labyrinth if he left to go searching now.

After thinking about it for another moment or two, Kirito decided that now would be a perfect time to power through Argo's guidebook instead. He'd find a secluded spot somewhere, and just read through as much of it as possible until it was time to meet up with Timely again.

He was still painfully lacking in information. Particularly about Mixing. He had that skill maxed, but still found himself having to buy potions since he didn't know any recipes. He could probably make better potions than anyone else in the game if he just knew how.

* * *

"I got all of it," Timely claimed.

"Are you serious?" Kirito asked. Because that was fast. Really, really fast. He was frozen in disbelief. His cloak however, and his Mask ability, ensured that his expression was hidden.

"Yeah," Timely confirmed.

"It's only been four hours," Kirito pointed out after looking at his game clock. How the hell had he managed that?

"Yeah. I'm pretty awesome like that."

"Alright. Drop trade me all of it, and the bonus is yours." He was going to need to give this guy a raise or something.

"Cool."

They walked over to the corner of the room, and took a seat at an empty table. Then they started the lengthy process of going through all of the items.

"So how much cor was left over at the end?" Kirito asked. He needed to know how much to pay him, after all.

"About negative 1.5 million."

"Negative?" Kirito asked, confused. "How does that work?"

"I called in some favours to get a lot of this stuff," Timely explained. "So not all of it is fully paid for. A lot of it is accumulating interest as we speak. Basically, since I have more than a few connections, I was allowed to purchase all of this without having to pay for it all upfront. So we can pay the rest of it back at any time. You know, within reason, of course."

Kirito hadn't even considered the possibility of buying items, and paying for them over time like that.

"I see. So I owe you 1.5 million more, then?"

"Yeah, thereabouts." Timely quickly opened up his menu and started rifling through it. "Technically I think it's 1,461,011, actually," he confirmed, after looking up the actual figure he had calculated, and written down earlier. "Oh, that includes the 2% rate we agreed to, by the way."

"Cool. Here's 1.5 million," Kirito replied, giving his assistant the money. "Pay everything back, and keep the rest. After you finish drop trading the rest of it to me, I'll give you the bonus. Sound good?" Kirito didn't really feel like going through the effort of pulling out exactly 1,461,011 cor, so he'd just round it up.

"Yeah, sounds good," Timely agreed.

They immediately started going through the mass-drop trading process. It was a pretty common sight to see in a player market, so they didn't really have to worry about anyone else trying to intercept a trade.

There weren't too many other players in the building, either. Most had headed off to find a place to sleep for the night, but there were still a few others hanging around. Some had even watched some of the trades between him and his assistant out of curiosity, surprised by the sheer quantity of items that they were transferring between each other. But Kirito didn't pay them any mind.

"So it ended up being almost two and a half million? That's about what I was expecting, actually," Kirito thought aloud. "Plus another one million for the bonus. So three and a half."

"Yeah," Timely confirmed. "Those swords were expensive. So was the armour actually. And you bought multiple copies of most of it. It was all state of the art, too. You can probably count the number of weapons currently in this game that are better than them on the fingers of one hand. All from players who had gotten super rare drops."

So Kirito had pretty much bought all of the best swords in the game. Now that he thought about it a little more, he could understand why it had cost him so much in the end. For every upgrade attempt of a weapon, there was always a chance that it wouldn't succeed. But the upgrade attempt would still count towards the total number of upgrades allowed, even if it failed.

The Anneal Blade could be enhanced a maximum of 8 times. So the probability of actually succeeding on all of those attempts was pretty low. A player would be considered extremely lucky to attempt 8 times, and succeed in 6. That was how it had been in the beta, anyways. But to get all 8, you had to be on a completely different level of lucky. Especially when you considered the fact that there probably weren't any maxed out Blacksmiths in the game yet. There were probably only a dozen or so +8's currently in existence, and Kirito had just bought 10 of them. So he had probably massively overpaid for them to get them so early on.

"But you know, I've got a question for you," Timely said.

"What is it?"

"Just between us, what do you need all of this equipment for? Nobody has ever done anything like what you have yet. There isn't a single player in the game who has spent so much money at once."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Not that I'm aware of anyway. There are some filthy rich players out there, but none of them have thrown their entire fortunes down the drain this quickly."

"I'd hardly call that my entire fortune." Kirito grinned under his hood. It seemed that his assistant underestimated how much money he had. He hardly even considered it impressive when compared to what he used to have. Before his Mixing grind, he had had about 50 million cor worth of ovules alone. Almost ten times what he had now. Back before he'd realized there may have been a way to sell them all.

He still wondered whether or not that had been the right decision, every now and then. It remained to be seen if it had been worth it.

"Are you serious?" Timely asked. "How much more do you have? You probably just spent more money than the combined wealth of the poorest 2,000 players in the game. You alone are now in the possession of a significant fraction of all the potions currently in existence in this game."

Kirito wasn't really sure about how shocking that statistic was supposed to be, since most of the poorest players were still in the starting town awaiting rescue and living day to day. Barely being able to afford the cost of living. So being richer than 2,000 of those people was hardly impressive from his point of view.

"Most of my wealth is in the form of rare items currently," Kirito explained. "I've only been selling the ovules so far. I've still got lots of other items that I need to liquidate."

"I take it that that's what some of the other deals you mentioned earlier are about?"

"Yeah."

"Shit. You're easily top ten then."

"Top ten?"

"Yeah. Top ten richest in the game. But you're the only one among them who is doing anything with your money. All the other whales are flipping, investing or merchanting theirs."

"Yeah, I'm not that type of player. Not yet anyways. Maybe eventually I'll do some of that. You know, if that's something you'd be willing to help me with."

"I think you already know my answer to that."

"I think I do too."

"So… what is it all about? Are you seriously building an army or something?"

"Or something, indeed."

"Seriously? You know you can tell me, right? I won't tell anyone else."

"I don't doubt it. The problem is, it's all time sensitive. I'd be willing to tell you about it after it's all over, but for now, it's best if I don't."

"I see. I guess that makes sense."

"Yeah. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. I'll bet it's some story, though."

Kirito didn't actually ever intend to tell the full truth. By saying he would however, he was simply giving himself time to either make up a believable story, or to defeat the floor boss and never speak to Timely again. He still wasn't sure which route he was going to take yet. His assistant was proving himself to be extremely valuable, but Kirito would still avoid him at all costs if he started asking him any nosy questions that he'd prefer to not answer.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	14. The Potion Engine

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

There was this system in Sword Art Online that oversaw every aspect of the world. It oversaw all the players and what they did, all the game mechanics, the quest generation, and even the mechanics of the game itself. It was simply referred to as the Cardinal System.

In most video games created throughout history, there tended to be exploitable oversights in the way they were programmed that would inevitably rise up to the surface after they had been in the hands of the public for a little while. When they were finally found, they would almost immediately be taken advantage of by the players.

At first, a game would come out and all would be well for the first few weeks, usually. But then holes would start appearing, and players would tend to figure out how to exploit those holes to do things that the developers had never wanted a player to be able to do.

In a world such as this one, Kayaba had probably never wanted to run into a situation like this since that would undermine everything he was trying to do. It was supposed to be his perfect world. And a world like that wasn't supposed to have exploitable oversights.

But the thing was, there had been no practical way for the man to find every single possible glitch on his own. Some were probably so subtle that it would take months and months for thousands of players all working together to find them. So Kayaba had designed a system that allowed his world to basically repair itself if a balance issue was detected.

Kirito had known about all of this in advance, of course. It was hardly a secret, after all. And there had always been a part of him that was constantly anticipating that, at any moment, this system would interfere with his Nepenthe grinding strategies. Or it would interfere with the way he used his sword skills. Or the way he was messing with the game's economy.

He kept making bigger and bigger impacts to the game world, and he was just waiting for the day that the Cardinal System decided that he'd taken a step too far and finally did something about it.

But it hadn't done so yet.

A lot of what Kirito had been doing so far couldn't have been intended by the original developers. It just seemed too exploitative to him.

Maybe the Cardinal System required a large population of players to take advantage of an exploit to do anything about it. Or maybe Kayaba had put in a time delay on anything his Cardinal System tried to fix just to make things interesting. That way a player could find an exploit and spend a few days benefiting from the discovery before a patch was introduced.

Kirito had no idea, and could only speculate.

But he was still waiting for the day where he took a step too far, and for that system to patch everything he was doing. And he was pretty sure that that day would come eventually. In fact, he was pretty sure it would come soon.

Especially once he implemented his next idea.

Because he had just found another one. Another exploit. At least, he wanted to call it one. And it was perhaps his biggest exploit yet. It was intricate, complicated, but actually... relatively straightforward once you understood all of the pieces to it.

Either way, he was very proud of himself for figuring out all of it on his own. It was so subtle that he was almost certain that nobody else had figured it out yet.

Kirito had periodically been going through all of the settings in every subpage of his menu over his time in the game so far, but he still had yet to do a complete investigation of everything. Which was something he intended to do once he wasn't so pressed for time. But even despite this fact, there were a few barely noticeable toggles that didn't seem to do anything important at first glance that Kirito had taken note of. They were buried deep in the inventory management settings, and they allowed him to do everything he was about to.

Firstly, there existed a Sorted Inventory feature that allowed a player to organize their inventory however they wanted. A player could use this feature to make it so that the system automatically placed certain items that entered their inventory into predetermined locations in the actual inventory list.

All of the weapons could be grouped into a block at the top of the list. Or all the potions could be. Or a player could come up with their own customized set of partitions for different things, and there were a ton of other options. Kirito had his own preferences and he had been making use of this feature this whole time. Most other players probably did as well.

It had probably been meant to be used only as a convenience, though. To prevent junk items from cluttering up the inventory, and to ensure that you could always find your commonly used items in the same place in the list, preventing the need to dig through everything to find what you were looking for.

However, it was upon developing his new cloak switching idea that Kirito realized he could take advantage of this mechanic in a new way, in combination with a few others. He had wanted his potions off his hotbar so that he could use those limited slots for other purposes. And having full control over the order in which his items appeared in the inventory list was the first piece of his plan to do so.

The second component of the strategy was a little known toggle that barely affected anything, and that even Kirito himself had had to do extensive experimentation to even find out what it did. There had been no helpful description for it that he could find, so he had had to figure it out on his own.

It was labelled: 'Static Hotkey Pointers.' Which wasn't exactly informative at first glance. But Kirito did have a good amount of experience in computer programming, so he had gotten a decent hint from the label. And after doing some extensive experimentation in figuring out what this toggle's function was, the name kind of made sense in hindsight.

It had to do with the interface that linked up the hotbar with the inventory list. Basically, from what he had figured out so far, you could imagine these little arrows called _Pointers_ , that every single slot on the hotbar used to point at things. If a hotbar slot was set to equip an item from the inventory for example, you could imagine this hotbar slot's pointer... pointing to this item in the inventory list.

This was how the system itself actually knew what to do when a hotkey gesture was activated by a player. It would look at the gesture being performed by the player first, and recognize it as a designated gesture that mapped to an action. So it would go and see which hotbar slot the gesture mapped to, and then it would find this hotkey pointer and see what it pointed at. The system would then follow this pointer and would be able to figure out what to do next upon reaching the action or item on the other side of the arrow.

But crucially, by default, it would not matter where the item itself actually resided inside the inventory list for the system to know what action to take. With the ability of a player to partition their inventory, and sort it however they chose to, you could imagine that there would be situations every now and then where one of these objects that are being pointed at from the hotbar can be moved to different positions in the list of items.

But it wouldn't matter. The hotkey would still work no matter what position in the inventory list the item was in at the moment, or if it changed later. This meant that these pointers pointed to the _items_ themselves by default, and _not_ specific locations in the inventory list.

If a hotkey was mapped to the action: 'Equip Anneal Blade,' for example, it would not matter if you had decided to sort your inventory beforehand to put this sword in a new position. The hotkey would still work. This meant that the pointers themselves automatically moved locations to follow whatever object they pointed at, as the ordering of the inventory list changed over time.

If you moved the Anneal Blade down 2 slots in the list in your inventory, you would not have to reconfigure your hotbar at all. Automatically, the relevant pointer would have followed the blade to the new spot. This was how it worked by default. The pointers locked onto the objects they pointed to.

But then there was this toggle called Static Hotkey Pointers. Static meant unmoving. So what did that mean in this context? Well, Kirito had done some tests, and figured it out.

When this toggle was active, it meant that these pointers would remain locked on fixed _positions_ in the inventory list. _Not_ on the items. And this was where things started to get a little bit more complicated.

It was difficult at first to see why this was different from the default setting. To summarize, if the toggle was active, a pointer pointing at position 1 in the inventory would always point to position 1, no matter what item actually existed there. If you wanted the hotkey to point at a specific sword in this case, the sword had better be at that position. Because if it wasn't, you wouldn't get it.

It was a very important, but very subtle distinction. Kirito had no idea why this toggle was a feature in the game at all, but it didn't really matter to him if he were being honest. Because with the inventory sorting feature, this mechanic could be exploited.

A player was fundamentally limited to 10 slots on the hotbar. But with the Static Hotkey Pointers toggle, and the ability to control which slot each item appeared in inside the inventory, you could potentially remap the hotbar dynamically as long as you could find a way to shift around the ordering of the items in the inventory list.

And Kirito had figured out how to do just that with the third piece of this puzzle. A piece that could really be summed up with a simple question.

How does the system handle empty inventory slots?

If Static Hotkey Pointers was active, and a player equips an item, this would cause that to happen. There would be a gap in the inventory list in that moment where the newly equipped item used to be. So what did the system do in those situations?

To prevent empty slots from showing up in the inventory list like this, the game was designed to collapse them, shifting all items beyond the blank slot up 1 space. Shifting a ton of items out of place. And the key idea here was that if some of those newly shifted items had been in inventory positions that had previously been pointed at due to the Static Hotkey Pointers toggle, they would no longer be there. Potentially screwing up the entire hotbar.

If Static Hotkey Pointers was not active, and it wasn't active by default, this would not happen. This was the core idea of the exploit. With a combination of partitioning your inventory in a clever way, and activating Static Hotkey Pointers, it was possible to remap your hotkeys by manipulating the positions of each item in the inventory.

Hotkey remapping was possible now, even in the middle of combat. But it was a very difficult thing to do. And it required a lot of inventory analysis and careful bookkeeping on all of the pointers. But it was possible.

He would not need to open his menu and switch hotbar presets anymore. This was where the application came in. Switching hotbar presets came with a system induced time delay that was impractical to get around in the middle of a fight. But hotkey remapping with this new idea was essentially instantaneous.

He had purchased 2 of the highest quality cloaks that he could get his hands on from Timely earlier, having anticipated exactly this idea.

A full iteration of the loop worked like this:

With the Static Hotkey Pointers toggle, it was possible to individually select which of his pointers he wanted to have this property, and which he wanted to remain normal. Using this mechanic, Kirito would start by setting up his inventory so that his first hotkey pointer was static, and he would leave all the other ones alone for the time being. For this specific exploit, the only pointer that mattered was his first one. None of the others played a role at all, so he would manage them later.

So pointer 1 would be static, and this would be the pointer belonging to his first hotbar slot. It would also be pointed at the first position in his inventory. The item right at the top of the list. So when he activated this hotkey, he would equip whatever item existed there, no matter what it was, as long as it was equippable.

In advance, however, he will have set up his inventory so that inventory slot 1 would always contain the first cloak he intended to wear in his battle, and inventory slot 2, just underneath it, would always contain his second cloak.

However, just because he told the system to do it this way, didn't mean that it would always look like that. Because this would only be the case if those cloaks were both in his inventory at the time. If either of them weren't, interesting things started to happen, and that was where the heart of this exploit revealed itself.

He would initiate his fight with Illfang with neither of his cloaks equipped. Once the battle officially started, Kirito would activate his first hotkey, which would equip his first cloak. However, in the background, as soon as that cloak leaves his inventory, slot 1 in his inventory will now be empty since he had just taken the item out of it. So the system will call the function that checks to see if there are any empty inventory slots, and will see that there is in fact, one. So it will collapse it. Shifting all items underneath it up by one space.

As a result, the item in slot two will now be sent up to slot 1 and all other items below it will follow suit, moving up one space. This would remap Kirito's first hotkey slot to the item that used to be in slot 2 since this pointer is static. So it now points at his second cloak. The one he had strategically positioned in advance for exactly this purpose.

So he would continue battling with Illfang at that point, and slowly deplete his first cloak of all the potions he had hidden inside of it until he ran out of them. When he finally did run out, he could again activate his first hotkey to equip the item in slot 1.

But his second cloak was the item that existed there now. So the system would try to equip that item.

However, the system would run into a small issue here. It would quickly realize that he was trying to equip an item into the cloak slot of his worn equipment. A slot which was currently occupied by his first cloak. So the system would realize that in order to succeed in equipping his second cloak, it would first have to de-quip his first cloak and send it into the inventory. So it would automatically do so. And his first cloak would then land back inside his inventory somewhere.

This was where the Code Execution Order, the order in which the system executed commands, came into play. Because it mattered what order the system's instructions were executed in, next.

The system wanted to do two things in this hypothetical scenario at this instant in time. Now that his cloak slot was empty, it wanted to try to equip the item in slot 1, his second cloak, once again. But it also wanted to re-sort his inventory according to the partitions that Kirito had set up. Which entailed placing the newly de-quipped cloak 1 back into the top slot of his inventory.

The system would execute both of these commands, but the order in which it did was crucial.

If the system sorted his inventory first, it would send his newly de-quipped cloak into the first slot of his inventory, and push all of the other items in the list down 1 slot to make room for it. Which meant that when the system then decided to execute the second command―equip the item in slot 1―it would simply re-equip the cloak it had just removed. The empty one that Kirito had just depleted of potions.

If this had been how the system had been designed, Kirito's entire exploit would have fallen apart right there. But luckily, the system had been designed the other way around.

In that moment, it would first equip the item in slot 1, and then sort his inventory after. Which meant that the system would equip his second cloak, and _then_ move his empty first cloak into the top position of his inventory. It would be back in slot 1, where his first hotkey could once again reach it.

Then Kirito could continue fighting until he depleted his newly equipped second cloak of potions.

But then he would run into another problem. When his second cloak was empty of potions, his first cloak would be as well. He'd be able to reach it with his first hotkey, but how would switching back to it help?

Kirito had lucked out on this front, too.

He had originally planned to brute force this strategy to the extreme. His original plan had literally been to buy a thousand cloaks, filling each of them with potions, and cycle through them all to prevent himself from ever running out. But this was incredibly impractical. And he would actually be surprised if there were enough cloaks of the required quality in existence throughout all of Aincrad yet.

It was also unnecessary, because Kirito had a very high Hiding level. His Hiding skill granted him the ability Hidden Items. Which allowed him to store small items in the various sleeves and pockets of his cloak. But there was a way to save presets on these cloaks as well. He could fill a cloak of his with a bunch of specific items, and tell the system: ' _I want you to remember this setup for next time so that I don't have to waste a bunch of time going through the process of refilling it manually.'_

But the developers, probably thinking that it was possible to exploit that mechanic in combat by refilling the cloak instantly while you were wearing it, only allowed this to be done when a cloak was in the inventory. If an empty cloak was in the inventory, but had a saved preset on it, it could automatically be refilled with the required items provided that those items were also in the inventory at the time, and you used the Hiding skill to do that.

It wouldn't do this instantly, however. To prevent a player from simply removing a cloak, having it instantly refill, and then re-equipping it again, there was a time delay. When it ran out, only then would it refill with items and be ready to go.

The thing was, however, this timer was one of the many things that Kirito's massively overpowered Hiding skill had significantly reduced. So rather than having to wait half an hour for his cloak to refill with items automatically, he only had to wait a few minutes. A short enough time for it to not matter.

Because while this timer was counting down in the background, Kirito would be using his second cloak. And by the time his second cloak was empty, the refill timer on his first cloak will have already expired, allowing him to switch back to it without ever running into this problem. This would allow him to continue his battle without any sort of delay at all, so long as he carefully managed his potion consumption rate.

All of this cloak refilling happened automatically without his input as long as he carefully managed his settings and told the system to do it that way. So then at this moment in his hypothetical battle, when he needed to switch back to his first cloak, he could do so. Again, with his first hotkey slot.

This would de-quip his newly emptied cloak 2, and in a similar manner to what had occurred earlier, the newly refilled cloak 1 would be re-equipped, and then cloak 2 would be sent to its corresponding position in the inventory list.

But then there was another potential problem. One that, again, Kirito had lucked out into avoiding due to the way that the system had been designed.

Kirito had set up his cloak partition to always place cloak 1 in slot 1 and cloak 2 in slot 2. But the system could only place items in their corresponding slots provided that the items were in the inventory at the time. And since cloak 1 will be equipped at the time, the system will not currently have any items reserved for position 1.

So when cloak 2 is being moved to position 2 in the inventory, and position 1 in the inventory is empty, how would you prevent a random item from getting stuck in that top slot? That would ruin everything if it happened.

But once again, the Code Execution Order saved the day.

It was set up so that the system will move the newly de-quipped cloak 2 into slot 2 _before_ collapsing the empty inventory slots. This pushed the item that was currently in slot 2, the item that had originally been in slot 3 at the start of the battle, down a slot to make room for it.

 _Then_ the empty slots would get collapsed. Placing his second cloak into slot 1, where it will be accessible with his first hotkey slot again. This reset everything to the way it was at the start of the battle. Meaning, this loop could be repeated over and over again as long as he still had potions in his inventory to refill his cloaks with.

Four instructions were executed by the system in this exact order whenever a player tried to equip an item. To summarize them as briefly as possible, they could be thought of like this:

1\. If the equipment slot you are equipping an item into is already occupied, de-quip the item, and send it into a temporary location in the inventory.

2\. Equip the new Item.

3\. Sort the inventory in accordance with the player's custom setup.

4\. Collapse all empty inventory slots.

Kirito's exploit only worked because of this specific ordering of system instructions. If any two instructions in this algorithm had switched their ordering, a problem will have prevented the exploit from working.

If instructions 2 and 3 had been reversed, he would have been unable to switch cloaks at all.

If instructions 3 and 4 had been reversed, then the problem would have been introduced late in his loop. When he had his second cloak equipped, and he tried to swap back to his first cloak, the system would have gone through this new ordering of commands.

Cloak 2 would be de-quipped, cloak 1 would be equipped, but then the empty slots would have been collapsed. This would have sent the item that had originally been in Kirito's 3rd inventory position into slot 1. Which would have screwed everything up. Because upon executing the final instruction, _sort_ , his second cloak would be placed into slot 2 and it would remain there because the slot above it would be occupied with a different item.

The system moving cloak 2 back into slot 2 only allowed him to access it from his first hotkey as long as the slot just above it was empty. So the System had to execute the ' _collapse empty slots'_ command after the ' _inventory sort'_ command, or else the cloak switch wouldn't be repeatable.

This was the final step in his potion engine, his solution to the problem of getting his potions off his hotbar while still being able to access them easily. He could do all of this while only using up 1 hotbar slot, leaving 9 others for other purposes.

Since Kirito could individually control which of his pointers were static and which weren't, all of this inventory manipulation wouldn't screw up his other hotkeys at all.

* * *

Kirito absolutely hated these stupidly long walks he had to force himself through every time he wanted to go anywhere. If it had been a flat plain without any obstacles that he needed to travel through, he could have simply sprinted through it with ease. But instead, it was the same dense forest he had been surrounded with ever since he had first isolated himself all the way out in the middle of nowhere. And he had to trudge through it in the middle of the night, while he was tired.

He hated it.

It had been a few hours since he had gotten all of his items from Timely, and he still hadn't slept yet. He could not allow himself to go to sleep until he located the boss room. That way, by the time he returned to his cave, probably sometime around noon or so, he could sleep until midnight, wake up, and immediately take on Illfang.

Today was technically December 1st. It was just really early in the morning. Which meant that tomorrow was the day of the boss meeting, and the final day that he would likely be able to challenge the boss on his own without anyone interfering.

He had his plan to take on that boss set in stone. All that remained was to find the boss room door, and then go to sleep. But in order to get there, he had to walk through this damn forest again.

* * *

There was another reason why he hated these long walks as well. While they gave him a lot of time to think up plans, and solutions to his problems… they also allowed his mind to wander around. And whenever it did that, it would always go to places he didn't want it to go.

Really depressing places. Right back to the first day of the death game, for example.

' _That damn Crasher.'_

Why did that player have to choose that day to be annoying? Now Kirito was a murderer for it. All sorts of possibilities flooded his mind whenever he thought about that player. What could he have done differently that day? Why had Kirito allowed himself to get riled up like that? Why couldn't he have just turned around and walked away?

Then there was that other player that had tried to kill him in that forest a little later on that same day by impaling him against a tree. Kirito could still feel the phantom pains in his stomach from that whenever he thought about it.

And then of course there was... _that_ memory. The one that made his stomach drop every time he thought about it. When he had been pinned to that tree with that sword, surrounded by a horde of Nepenthes all trying to kill him, and him having to fight with everything he had to stay alive.

His mind would always replay that event over and over again, and Kirito just couldn't shut it off. If he had made even the slightest error during any of it, he'd be dead. His brain would have been fried by the NerveGear. And his mind would just loop through that event again and again. Kirito could see every last placement of his feet, and every last movement of his sword in his mind's eye from the entire battle back then.

He still had no idea how he had managed to pull off some of those moves. That had all been before he had started learning to involve acrobatics into his fighting style. So while he could replicate everything he had done back then, now, he had no idea how his body had thought to do all of that in the moment.

Particularly that _one_ move, that weird front flip spin that had allowed him to redirect his momentum up that tree. There were so many moments where he had been sure that he was dead. But somehow he had made it through. And his mind just wouldn't stop dwelling on it. At least… not until he found something else to occupy his time with.

* * *

Kirito tried to imagine what someone watching him at that very moment would be thinking.

' _What a weirdo.'_

' _What the hell is he doing?'_

' _Clearly he's screwed in the head.'_

Probably something like that, he'd imagine. Frankly, they probably would have a point, too. Because what he was doing now probably wouldn't even slightly benefit him at all. And it looked ridiculous. But every time his mind wandered into dark places and all the occasions where he had almost died, doing something like this would usually pull himself out of it after a while.

He was shooting his hands up, and down again every few seconds or so, miming pulling off the NerveGear on his head as quickly as possible.

Obviously, it didn't do anything. The NerveGear blocked all of his body's electrical signals from reaching the outside world at all. So he couldn't actually pull the thing off his head in the real world no matter how hard he tried to. If it were that easy to get out of Sword Art Online, he'd have been out long ago, after all. As would the rest of the players.

But Kirito still had a reason for doing what he was doing. It was a complete Hail Mary that would almost certainly not do anything if the time actually came, but he figured that maybe it was worth a shot after all. He was bored anyway. So between thinking about all the times he could have died, or doing this, Kirito preferred this option, because maybe it would actually help.

In the worst case scenario where he died in the game, and the order was sent to his NerveGear to fry his brain… maybe there would be a window of time where he could fling the device off his head. Maybe, as the NerveGear was destroying itself, he could rocket his arms up and fling it off. Maybe if he had practiced the motion over and over and over again in the game world to burn the movement into his muscle memory, maybe even as his brain was being fried, he could get it off and limit the damage somewhat.

There were stories out there of people having half of their brains medically removed, after all. Hemispherectomies. Something about preventing really intense seizures in patients who had them. He didn't know all the details, but the point was that there were real people out there with extensive brain damage that lived relatively normal lives.

And then there were people that came around every now and then like that _one_ guy back in the 1800's. That guy who had had a railway spike blown straight through his face and up through the top of his skull, and yet had somehow survived to become an almost mythical figure in medical history.

Even Kirito had heard of that story, after all. So maybe he could do something if the worst happened. Maybe he could limit the brain damage he would otherwise receive from being fatal. Or even prevent it altogether.

But in all likelihood, it probably wouldn't help at all. Kayaba had probably designed the NerveGear to block all signals throughout the entire process. Meaning that there probably weren't any windows of time where Kirito could move, even as the internal battery was frying his brain.

His real body would have been comatose for months as well, and severely weakened. So he probably wouldn't be able to move quickly enough with such a weak body even if there was a window where it was theoretically possible.

But who knows? Maybe with a little adrenaline, and a lot of luck, he could pull it off. At the very least, it kept his mind occupied, preventing it from dwelling on the past. And it's not like anyone was around to watch him make a fool of himself like this. He was invisible even if they were.

* * *

834.

…

835.

…

836.

…

Kirito exited the densest parts of the forest a moment later.

He had spent the last 20 minutes or so practicing his cloak switches, his weapon rotations, and just trying to burn all of the hotkey gestures he needed for the upcoming battle into his muscle memory.

Now that the area in front of him was clear however, he put everything away, broke into a jog, and then into a sprint, all while keeping his eyes on his Hide Rate to ensure his camouflage wouldn't deactivate.

The faster he found this boss room, the faster he'd be able to get back to his cave.

* * *

Since it was so early in the morning, there weren't many players still out. This made it very easy for Kirito to make it all the way to the Labyrinth without a problem.

No one had spotted him, and in fact, he hadn't even seen another player his whole way there. Kirito had taken a pretty roundabout route that had pretty much guaranteed that he wouldn't see anyone else.

So everything was still going according to plan. Now he just had to get in and out of this dungeon as quickly as possible.

The sun was just beginning to rise just as Kirito rushed through the entrance of the Labyrinth.

* * *

Kirito made no attempt to battle any enemies. Even the ones that were in his way he was usually able to jump over or otherwise get around. The odd one or two had been perfectly positioned so as to block a hallway, so that Kirito had had to kill them, but he only did so in areas where there weren't any players. Whenever he started fighting, his camouflage would deactivate, after all. So he had to be extremely careful.

There were a few other players here. People pulling all-nighters to grind. He had seen a few of them as he rushed through the dungeon. But none of them had seen him yet, and Kirito intended to keep it that way.

Turning a corner, Kirito spotted a staircase leading deeper into the dungeon and immediately started running towards it.

The four monsters that spawned in front of him were annihilated in seconds without Kirito having to even slow down.

* * *

Kirito had his map open, and it was automatically recording all the corridors he travelled through into it. It was a very convenient feature that prevented him from ever having to worry about getting lost, and it also allowed him to easily double back whenever he reached a dead end.

Luckily for him, this dungeon had already mostly been cleared out. If it hadn't been, then there would have been almost no way he could have run through it as easily as he was now.

Players had to advance extremely cautiously into floor dungeons as they were usually packed with hundreds of thousands of monsters that had to be cleared out first. There was a Territory mechanic that all dungeons in the game had. It existed outside of dungeons as well, but it was particularly extreme inside of them.

As a group of players advanced into a new dungeon, they conquered territory inside it. This happened automatically by defeating all of the monsters in the area and then remaining in said area for a little while after. And as this territory is conquered by the players, the monster spawn rate would drastically decrease over that conquered territory.

When all of it was conquered, the players would usually refer to the dungeon as being 'cleared'. As the dungeon wouldn't pose much of a threat any longer. Making it safe for solo players to easily walk through any of the hallways without too much trouble.

But upon first entering a new dungeon, especially a floor dungeon, one that hadn't yet had any of its territory conquered, it was usually required that dozens of players gathered together as a group to take the first steps inside. Because the monsters fought hard for every last inch of land.

On top of the extremely high spawn rate of the unconquered territory, there was a garrison of monsters pre-spawned into the game on top of this land. Monsters that won't ever be replaced when they are killed, but that still contributed to the huge amount of enemies that have to be defeated.

It was not uncommon to have to kill a million enemies or more to completely clear out every room of a floor dungeon. This usually required hundreds of players to gather and fight together for multiple days, or even weeks in a row. It was a brutal struggle the whole way through.

During this first pass-through of a dungeon, it was often the case that you would have to kill thousands and thousands of monsters just to capture a little side room with nothing in it. It could take days to conquer just a single room if it was a cavern, a room notorious for its huge size and ridiculous number of enemies inside.

There were so many enemies inside dungeons at the start, that what players would often do before even stepping inside the place for the first time was to send a single player inside to lure hordes of these pre-spawned monsters outside where they could be defeated in the wide open area outside the entrance of the dungeon instead of inside the cramped hallways, allowing them to deal with some of this garrison without also having to deal with the monsters that rapidly spawned into the game at the same time. It made the first steps into the dungeon easier.

But there were a few saving graces in this insanity. For one, there was a monster cap. There was a finite number that the system kept track of in the background, that denoted the total number of monsters that were allowed to spawn in that dungeon before it would be considered cleared. And this number would never go up. Only down.

This meant that even if the players could not advance any further into the dungeon because they were just swamped with enemies, they would still be progressing by killing them.

It was an intricate and very complicated system. And a lot of math was used to keep it balanced.

The system was constantly increasing or decreasing the monster spawn rate based on what areas of the dungeon had been conquered already and which areas hadn't been. This system even organized monster raids―groups of monsters that gathered together in dangerous groups and attempted to retake lost land. But there were milestones and checkpoints as well―areas that if you conquered them, would never be retaken by these counterattacks.

So what a party of players would commonly do was make a beeline for these checkpoints as soon as possible to establish a foothold in the dungeon, and only branch out later. Allowing them to keep their progress even if they all had to leave or retreat.

It was truly insane the sheer number of enemies that could fit inside these dungeons. But their insane numbers were spread out over the entire labyrinth. Which meant that you didn't have to fully clear every single room to make it to the boss.

In fact, only one dungeon had ever been completely cleared throughout the entire beta test. And it had required a massive week long effort from hundreds of players to manage it. In every other dungeon, the players had defeated the floor boss and moved on to the next floor due to a lucky player finding the boss room relatively quickly. Preventing the need to conquer every single room.

Sometimes a floor boss could be defeated while only having to defeat as little as 10 or 15 percent of the dungeon's entire population of monsters if you get lucky enough in the search for the boss.

But in any case, the dungeon Kirito was currently inside looked pretty much empty. Over the last month, the front line players had been doing a ton of work in clearing their way through the place.

Kirito hadn't even seen any territory marked as unconquered on his map yet. There probably was still a good bit of it left somewhere, which still made the dungeon dangerous due to the possibility of raids spawning into the game and blindsiding him, but he hadn't seen anything of the sort, yet.

Over the next few months, long after Illfang was dead, in order to completely secure the area, other players would have to continue the process of going through every last room in the massive dungeon to completely render it safe.

There was still a ton of stuff left to do inside the place, anyways. Valuable loot, minibosses, and most importantly, book pages. Valuable information about secret quests, skills, and the game in general was usually hinted at on book pages, which were almost exclusively found inside floor dungeons. So it was still extremely worthwhile to finish clearing the place out even after the floor boss was defeated.

Kirito however, probably would not be the person to take on that task. While the info was important, it was random. He was just as likely to find some information on how to use the Crafting skill to make some secret jewellery as he was to learn about something he could actually benefit from. Like a secret potion recipe or something. So his time was better spent on getting stronger.

To do that he needed xp. And the best way to get a ton of xp was to solo Illfang. So he couldn't let himself be distracted from this goal. He was there for a reason. Find the boss door as quickly as possible, and get out. That was it.

* * *

Kirito's strategy in finding the room was relatively straight forward. Like always, he started by assuming the worst case scenario. That scenario entailed that the boss room had already been located by the rest of the players, and that the boss meeting tomorrow would entail revealing this information to everyone there, and assembling a raid party to go take it out that same day.

If this scenario was not the case, and the boss room had not yet been located, then Kirito would have more time to locate the room and would not have to push himself forward on such a tight schedule. He could afford to be wrong here, in other words. He'd just have to restructure his plan accordingly.

But it didn't matter anyway. Because the worst case scenario ended up being the correct one. The boss room had been found by the other players after all. The room that the door was in had been cleared out already by the other players.

All Kirito had needed to do to find it was to only travel down pathways in the dungeon that had no enemies in them. Reasoning that if the boss had been found, the players would have had to clear a path to it that he could simply follow himself. So whenever he had seen some monster controlled red territory on his map during this search, he had double backed and found another path. Because if the boss room hadn't been found yet, and was still in monster controlled territory, he'd have more time to find it later.

He had planned for the worst case scenario, and was pretty relieved that it had ended up being the correct one because it meant that he didn't have to change his schedule. He knew where the boss room was now, and had it marked on his map. It had only taken him 4 hours of dungeon crawling.

All of his problems had now been solved. He could now focus entirely on the upcoming battle tomorrow morning, and on returning to his cave so he could have a really long, relaxing sleep.

* * *

Kirito let out a yawn as he calmly walked through the halls of the dungeon.

...And nearly let out a yelp in surprise as something _slammed_ into the wall at high speed right next to him the instant he turned the next corner.

Of course, Kirito didn't actually make a sound at all. Managing to stop himself from doing so at the last moment.

His mind raced, and he instinctively checked his interface to make sure he wasn't vulnerable. His camouflage was still active, and his Hide Rate was nowhere near the danger zone. He can't have been spotted by anyone in this dungeon. He knew by heart the complete list of monsters that could be found in there, and none of them had powerful enough senses to detect him when he was like this. Not unless Kirito decided to rush into their territory, anyways.

Glancing down at the object in front of him, the one that had slammed into the wall a couple of feet in front of him, Kirito immediately noticed that the object was actually a monster. One of the multitudes of Kobold type monsters that were common in the area.

It was nearly dead though. Taking a look at it's health bar, Kirito noticed that the thing was almost at 0.

Had it been launched by something? Turning in the direction that the monster had seemingly come from with this question in mind, he saw a player with an outstretched rapier pointed right back at him.

For a moment, Kirito froze. As it looked a lot like the player was pointing the thing directly at him. But then the more rational side of him kicked in, and he noticed that this player had been the one responsible for blowing the monster across the room, and nearly giving Kirito a heart attack. The player was simply looking at the aftermath of their attack, and had no way at all to see him since he was invisible.

The player had been fighting the Kobold, but instead of killing it efficiently like a normal player would, had instead taken to humiliating the poor thing by blasting it away like a rocket, straight into the closest wall, without the slightest care for any invisible beings who may have been walking nearby.

Kirito took one considering glance at the player, before turning away and continuing his walk towards the dungeon exit, mentally cursing in irritation with every step. At himself for letting his guard down and nearly getting _bodied_ by a flying Kobold, and at the random player who was carelessly catapulting monsters around.

The player was obviously a complete bastard, and Kirito wrote them off as such as he left the room, far more awake and alert than he had been a couple of minutes prior, and with a furiously beating heart. If he had been walking just the slightest bit faster, he probably would have gotten hit by that thing.

And wouldn't that have come as a surprise to both of them? Kirito would have spent all of this time and effort into hiding himself from everyone, just to get randomly struck by a flying Kobold from a player who was very clearly a moron.

* * *

When Kirito finally set foot in his cave again, he took a look at his game clock.

9:45 a.m.

He had so much more time left over than expected. Hours and hours of it. And all of that extra time lifted a huge weight off of his shoulders. He could take on Illfang even earlier than expected if he wanted to, now.

With a grin on his face, he set his alarm for 9:00 p.m.

There was no way he'd sleep for that long and he knew it. But if by some act of god he managed it, he'd still have more than enough time to solo Illfang upon waking up.

Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day. But with so much time available to him to just sleep in, he'd definitely be ready for it.

* * *

Argo had woken up bright and early for this moment. She was among the crowd of players waiting for _that_ player to show up. The Nameless Merchant. A lot of players were very curious about him. And she could certainly count herself among them for her own reasons. Since her information network had failed to dig anything... _juicy_ up for her, she had decided to simply take a look for herself.

Maybe she'd even get a chance to speak with him, one on one. She grinned to herself at the possibility.

Argo raised one delicate eyebrow in suspicion, however, when she noticed only the merchant's assistant Timely Advice show up to greet the group of players in front of the market.

"Attention Everyone," Timely spoke above the crowd, getting everyone's attention. "My client has signed a contract and set up a trade agreement with a merchant by the name of Agil. As a result, my client's stock of Nepenthe ovules is now being sold exclusively in that shop. My client will not be returning here again. If you intend to purchase an ovule today, you will have to go there, thank you."

Then he walked off without another word, ignoring the frustrated groans in the crowd of players.

"Wait what?!" Argo exclaimed, eyes widening in surprise. Then they narrowed in anger. That turn of events had thrown a couple of monkey wrenches into her plans. So she wasn't even going to get a chance to see this merchant in person anymore?

Her glare followed Timely Advice as he began to walk away from the crowd, and she quickly made a decision. She was not going to be denied this opportunity. Argo grinned viciously as a new plan rapidly formed in her head.

* * *

"Hey," a voice called out behind Timely Advice as he walked away from the market.

A player had apparently followed him. Turning around, he immediately recognized the person who had called out to him, and a feeling of dread instantly filled him.

Argo the Rat. Everyone knew who she was, after all. And since he knew who she was, he already had a pretty good idea about what she wanted. And he knew that this was going to be an annoying conversation.

"Can I help you, Argo?"

"You can indeed!" Argo immediately proceeded in an exaggerated childish tone. "I would be ever so grateful if you told me where I could find your current employer!"

"Yeah, I'm not going to do that."

"Thanks so much!" Argo cheerfully replied, completely ignoring the rejection and continuing on as if he had instead accepted her request whole-heartedly.

She then immediately fell into step next to him.

"Huh?"

"You're such a great guy, helping out a helpless, frail little girl like me! I really appreciate it!"

"I'm pretty sure I said no, actually."

"So where can I find this super amazing merchant?" Argo asked, completely ignoring the rejection, yet again.

Timely Advice let out a sigh in irritation. "Look Argo, you should know how this works. I'm not going to give up an anonymous player's identity. Especially to someone like you."

"Someone like me?! I'm hurt! Just what are you implying?!"

Timely Advice looked at her for a few moments with a flat stare. Then he turned around and started walking away.

"See ya later, Argo."

He made it about 10 steps before he noticed that Argo was following right behind him. He clicked his tongue in annoyance, and then perhaps the strangest sequence of events that he had experienced in the game so far, played out.

Without a word, he had continued walking, with Argo following right behind. He continued walking for almost half an hour without either of them saying anything. He walked through back alleys, around corners, through buildings, and even spent about 15 minutes walking in literal circles around the town's main square.

Argo had followed at his heels the whole time with that same stubborn grin on her face, tainted with a hint of childish rage. She had come to meet the merchant, and wouldn't be denied.

But Timely Advice had dealt with passive aggressive temper tantrums like this one before. He had a younger sister who liked to act out in much the same way whenever she didn't get what she wanted, so he was able to handle this situation, more or less.

He took a seat on the ledge of a fountain, and then, totally ignoring Argo as she sat down right next to him, he opened up his menu and started sending off some messages to his various connections. He had some work that he needed to do today. Work totally unrelated to his recent anonymous client. And if Argo wasn't going to leave anytime soon, he'd just ignore her. That was, in his experience, the best way to deal with stubborn people. Ignore them completely until they leave. Out-stubborn them.

And he was pretty sure that he could do it. He was a pretty stubborn bastard himself. And he would be stunned speechless if Argo could compete with him on that front.

* * *

He was stunned speechless.

The two of them had sat on the edge of the fountain for over 5 hours without either of them saying a word. Timely had hoped that she would leave after a while out of sheer boredom, but he had clearly miscalculated. Because she, like him, also had other work that she needed to get done. Work that she, like him, could get done while they were sitting there.

So he was actually the one who ran out of things to do first, not her. And so he was stuck waiting with nothing to do while she continued communicating with her contacts over private messages.

His eyes narrowed in annoyance.

' _Screw this,'_ Timely thought to himself.

He needed to shake her off. He spent the next couple of minutes coming up with a plan of action before finally standing up, ready to execute it. Without any outward indication at all, he abruptly started walking away from the fountain.

As expected, Argo immediately stood up to follow him. But since the action had been slightly unexpected, she had lagged a little bit in her response. As a result, Timely was able to create a large enough distance between them to have a real shot of executing his plan successfully.

Rounding a corner, he managed to get out of her line of sight for long enough to activate the teleport crystal in his hand without her being able to stop him. An instant later, he was in the Town of Beginnings.

Without delay, he sprinted as fast as he could through the crowded streets, before stepping inside a bar full of players. He didn't plan on staying long however. Just long enough to change his appearance by equipping a full body cloak and putting the hood up.

He then stepped back outside and started walking at a casual pace. Plenty of players were wearing cloaks like his with their hoods up, and his intention had been to blend in with them. He spent about 5 minutes or so walking through the city streets before finally entering a different bar in a different section of town, and sitting down at the only unoccupied seat at the counter.

With a small sigh of relief, he slumped in the chair and relaxed. Then he looked to his left and froze. Because the whiskered face of Argo was staring right back at him with a teasing smirk. Neither said a word to each other for a few more moments as Timely's mind raced.

Not only had she followed him somehow, but she had beat him here. She had somehow even figured out exactly where he was going to sit down.

Fuck.

Grudgingly, he could admit to himself that he was impressed.

"How in the _fuck_ ," Timely emphasized, "did you do that?"

"Whatever do you mean?" Argo replied.

Timely Advice glared at her, but didn't respond. Instead, a new plan came to mind, and he prepared to execute it.

"Excuse me miss," he suddenly called out to the bartender.

"What would you like today, sir?," the NPC owner replied as she walked over towards him.

"I'd like to rent a room at the inn." Out of the corner of his eye, Timely saw Argo's eyes narrow in annoyance. Clearly she understood his plan and didn't like it one bit. By renting a room, he could prevent her from entering it by blacklisting her.

"Do you really want to keep playing this game?" Argo asked, annoyed. "You're going to lose."

"What game? You're the only one playing here. I'm not going to tell you who my client is. And frankly, I think you're a piece of trash for trying to dig into someone's private life like that. They are anonymous for a reason. And you should respect that."

"When did I ever say I wanted to know who _he_ is?"

"You're The Rat. Of course you want to know who _they_ are."

"Of course I do. But I don't buy and sell identities of anonymous players like that. I thought that that was common knowledge."

"It's also common knowledge that you have a price for everything."

"Except for that! That sort of transaction can kill people! It's bad enough that there are other info dealers out there that buy and sell lists of names of beta testers and other anons. But I don't!"

"So then what do you want?"

"I don't want to know _who_ he is. Well, I do, but I don't need to know right now. I want to know _where_ he is."

"I don't know where _they_ are."

"You can stop with the 'they'. I know it's a guy."

"And how exactly did you figure that out?"

"How do you think?"

"I see. Spies, huh? You got someone to eavesdrop on us?"

"Of course not! I would never! I simply hired someone to take a walk in a location that just happened to be nearby where the two of you were!"

"By total coincidence I'm sure," Timely replied.

"...And since it was in public," Argo continued, "one could hardly be blamed for overhearing certain things."

"Right. Of course. Because that's not eavesdropping at all."

"In any case, that is what I'm after. Where, not who."

"Well I don't know where _they_ are. So it sounds like you wasted your time. So if you'll excuse me, an annoying rat is refusing to leave me alone, so I'm going to rent out a room, and blacklist her from entering it."

"You don't need to tell me, for me to find out," Argo warned.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"You want to know how I beat you here?"

Timely remained silent. But internally, he was very curious.

"I have a network of spies who work for me. You already know that. As do most other players. I knew you'd try to teleport away from me at some point, so I had a few people watch the teleport gate."

"You're a public figure as well," she continued. "So a lot of people recognize you."

"Which means that while you may have eluded me temporarily, my spies immediately recognized and followed you from a distance. I even had a few people stake out all of the popular hideouts."

"Popular hideouts?" Timely inquired.

"Mm. You see, you aren't the first person who's tried to run away from me. You're not even the tenth. I've gone through this routine dozens of times, and I know exactly where everyone likes to hide when they think they are being clever."

"So one of my people saw you change your appearance, and followed you. Keeping tabs on you until I was able to figure out exactly where you were going. All I had to do then was sit down, and wait at that point. I even threw in an extra trick involving getting a bunch of my people to occupy all of the seats at the bar counter except for the exact one that you are sitting in right now."

Then, in a terrifying display of just how much power Argo actually had at her disposal, she clapped her hands twice, and everyone else at the bar counter stood up simultaneously, and walked away, leaving the two of them alone. The only other customers in the place were sitting at the various tables in the building.

"And that left only one seat for you to sit in. So I took the one next to that."

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Timely asked, more than a little disturbed at what he had just seen. "Isn't that… you know. Revealing your hand?"

"Normally, sure. But I want to illustrate a point to you. There is nowhere you can go where I cannot find you. Sure you can hide in your inn room and block anyone else from being able to enter it, but the instant you leave, I'm just going to follow you again."

"And unlike you, I actually train and grind levels, as well. Meaning, I'm much stronger and faster than you are. Try to physically out-run me, and I'll catch up. So it'll really be much simpler for everyone involved if you just cooperate and tell me what I want to know," Argo finished.

"And I already told you that I don't know where _they_ are."

Argo let out a sigh in annoyance.

"Fine then. I guess we'll just have to do it the hard way," Argo declared. "Whether or not you're lying about what you know, I don't care. But at some point, he'll come by and meet up with you again. He's an anon, after all. So he can only drop trade with you in person. So it looks like you're going to be my new buddy for the foreseeable future. At least until the merchant shows up."

"I'll be there when he does," Argo claimed, "and then he'll become my new buddy. And since he's anonymous, he hasn't added you as a friend, so you can't message him to warn him about any of this."

"Why do you care about this guy so much? Why are you going to such extremes?"

"Don't you want to know all about what he's up to? He completely destroyed the economy with that Nepenthe ovule trick of his. And nobody knows how he's doing it. Except maybe you, of course..." Argo trailed off ominously.

"Yeah, no. I may or may not know what he's doing, but either way, I'm not telling you."

"Tch. Figures."

"But I want to know," Argo claimed. "That's all there is to it."

"Well good luck with that then. That guy is a wall when he wants to be."

"Oh I'm real good at talking to walls."

"I'm sure you are."

"So I hope you'll take care of this delicate girl while we wait for the mysterious one to arrive! I can already see that we will become great friends!"

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Keepie, Gabriella Gadfly**


	15. The Boss Room

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito had woken up almost half an hour ago.

Despite this, however, he still remained where he was, laying on his side in his sleeping bag and staring at the wall of his tent.

He hadn't left his cave.

Kirito still had a lot of time. It wasn't even 8pm yet. So he had decided to wait for a while before setting out.

Since waking up, he had spent almost all of his time going over his plans for the upcoming boss battle once more. Trying to see if there were any holes in them that he had somehow missed during the dozens of previous mental run-throughs.

During this time, he had come up with a new idea. It was such a simple idea, that he had no idea why nobody had ever tried it before. Even he had never thought of it until just this moment.

The pillars.

Kirito had been theorycrafting for this day for a long time. But he hadn't truly considered the layout of the boss room itself in his plans.

He could take advantage of them.

Illfang was huge. And he had a big weapon. He also had 2 main sorts of attacks with that weapon. Slashes, and thrusts.

The slashes were fast and strong, but they were telegraphed, and could easily be dodged by someone as fast as Kirito. But even when dodged, the shockwave produced by them would slowly eat away at his health over time.

The thrusts on the other hand, while much weaker, were harder to dodge. But they could be parried easily enough, and most importantly, they did not have nearly the same amount of force behind them as the slashes. Which meant that there would be no AOE shockwave to worry about from them. They also presented an opening. When parrying a thrust like this, it was very easy to turn the tables and counterattack, whereas slashing attacks could be chained together in a continuous fashion which made it harder to do so.

It would, therefore, in theory, be generally a good thing if Kirito could somehow prevent Illfang from using any slashing attacks and restrict the boss to only thrusting attacks. They would be a bit harder to dodge, but Kirito was sure that he could do it.

Over a long period of time, the advantages of a restriction like this were just better than fighting the boss normally.

All that remained was the actual method to impose such a restriction.

The pillars.

Inside the boss room, there were multiple giant pillars along the walls.

If, for example, Kirito chose to stand right next to one of these pillars, specifically so that the pillar was on his left hand side, what would the boss be forced to do when it tried to attack him?

Illfang would run towards him, and attack. But if Illfang tried a horizontal slash from his right hand side, Kirito would not even need to move to avoid it. The giant weapon would strike the pillar and bounce off, allowing Kirito to counterattack in the opening presented from this.

He could use the pillar as a shield.

Kirito could then return to his place next to the pillar immediately afterwards once the boss collected itself.

So by simply standing in this location, Kirito would limit an entire series of possible attacks from the boss. And not just any series either. Illfang carried his main weapon in his right hand. Which meant that slashes from that direction were the strongest type that he could dish out. A slash from any other direction would have to involve reaching awkwardly, which made the strike inherently weaker.

This was why standing with the pillar on Kirito's _left_ hand side was the best strategy. To shield against attacks dished out from Illfang's _right._

If the boss decided to be clever and sneak around the pillar, then Kirito would simply move as well. Forcing the boss to always have to deal with this annoyance.

There was plenty of room around every side of the pillars. So Kirito could easily run circles around any of them to implement this strategy.

After eliminating an entire direction of attacks like this, the boss would be left with slashes of three main types left. Those from above, those from below, and those from the left.

Those from above and below were trivial to deal with, however. They could simply be sidestepped with almost no effort.

But slashes from the left would also be possible to counter as well.

Illfang carried a shield in his left hand. Which meant that, in order to slash from that direction with his main weapon, Illfang would have to first reposition it to that side. And only then could he swing with it.

But this required two movements from the boss. Reach over to get the weapon in place, and then swing. The first movement however, would immediately tell Kirito what was going on. To counter it, all he would need to do is move to the other side of the pillar, a movement that would only take a single step. This would automatically negate the swing as it would again, bounce off the pillar to no effect.

To summarize, by simply maneuvering around a pillar in a precise way, he could in theory, entirely block all slashing based attacks from the boss, leaving only thrusts to have to worry about.

This had the added advantage of preventing Kirito from having to leap and flip all across the room in a super dramatic, and super tiring, back-and-forth battle.

Instead he could simply maneuver around the pillar as appropriate, and use his spins only when an opening presented itself, before returning to his original position.

This strategy would also help him deal with the minions, too.

By maneuvering around a pillar, he could completely disengage from the boss.

Illfang would try to attack, and Kirito would just walk in a circle around the pillar, and vanish from the boss's striking range. Then Illfang would try to reposition. So Kirito would do so as well.

And since Kirito was faster and more agile, he would always win this little game, rendering Illfang in a perpetual state of trying to maneuver around the pillar after him in an attempt to catch up.

By doing such a simple action, he could prevent Illfang from attacking him so long as Kirito sacrificed his own ability to attack the boss in the process. Forcing a stalemate situation.

During this stalemate however, Kirito would be able to wait for the minions to approach him, and then he could take them out separately.

He could kill all the minions while he was keeping Illfang on the opposite side of the pillar, and then Kirito would have a window of time to fight the boss for a short while before the next wave of minions spawned in.

And then he'd repeat the process.

Over and over again, for as long as it took to win.

Maybe if he was lucky, there would even be a limit to the number of minions that spawn. If that happened, then his life would be made so much easier.

Kirito was confident that he could defeat Illfang on his own when there weren't any minions to worry about. But with the minions always interrupting, he wasn't so sure that he could win. So if he could do those two battles separately, then the fight would be massively simplified.

So he planned to give it an hour.

After getting used to his pillars strategy, and all the subtlety in maneuvering around them to stop the boss from hitting him, he intended to spend one full hour only focusing on the minions to see if he could kill enough of them that they would just stop spawning in.

And if they kept spawning, only then would he try to fight the boss itself.

So that was the plan, currently.

It sounded okay in theory, so he'd just have to see how well it held up in practice.

With this final thought in mind, Kirito stood up, and started packing up his tent and all of his equipment.

* * *

This was the final test before the battle.

Kirito equipped all of the equipment he intended to use, and then drank one full set of all of his potions.

He needed to see just how much his speed and strength would increase under all of his boosts, and get used to moving around like that.

The difference was astounding.

As he flipped and spun through the air in the small, empty clearing, it felt to him as if gravity had been halved.

It was so much easier to move around.

But, alas, 30 seconds later, they all died out.

He found himself back to normal.

' _This battle is going to get complicated,'_ he realized.

Every 30 seconds, he was going to need to renew all of his potion effects. But he didn't even know if that was feasible while in the middle of a life or death struggle. That might simply be too much to handle.

He didn't have a potion runner to rely on. Or anyone else at all, for that matter. He'd have to do everything himself.

Here, in this clearing, where he wasn't distracted by a floor boss, he could keep up with everything easily.

But with Illfang breathing down his neck for real, and with the minions constantly interrupting him, and with having to keep track of all of his cooldowns, his cloak switches, and where all the enemies were, and how they were attacking him so he could figure out the best way to counter, all while his life was on the line… he was just going to have to see if he could do all of that or not.

If all else failed, he did have a teleport crystal he could use. He actually had several, just in case he needed to make multiple attempts.

If he almost died on his first try and was forced to teleport out of the room, he'd probably have the spare time to make another attempt or two.

Taking one final look at his menu, at all of his hotkeys, Kirito confirmed that everything was exactly where it should be.

He had his emergency teleport, his potion engine was set up correctly, his swords and backup swords were all in place…

He was good to go.

It was time.

He had done all that he could in the time that he had. Now it was time to see if it was enough.

He sighed.

Then, he opened his map and started walking to the Labyrinth.

* * *

Once again, Kirito was not spotted by any player on his journey over, and there were no complications.

Everything was going exactly as planned.

Walking inside the floor dungeon once again, Kirito started retracing his steps from earlier that morning.

* * *

Kirito felt his nervousness increase with every step he took towards the boss room.

His insides felt like they were tightening.

Nobody had ever done what he was about to. Nobody had ever even tried, he was pretty sure.

This would probably be the hardest thing he had ever done.

Kirito rounded a corner.

_Wham!_

...And nearly leaped out of his skin when something slammed into the wall right in front of him.

After identifying the object as a Kobold, Kirito glanced to his left and... saw almost exactly what he expected.

' _I swear to god I'm gonna to kill this goddamn asshole!'_

This freaking _rapier user_ was still here. Still… launching Kobolds around.

It's been over 12 hours, Kirito realized, after looking at his game clock. Half a day had passed since this exact same situation had happened.

' _Just go home already!'_

Kirito watched as the rapier user got into yet another battle with a group of monsters.

Secretly, he started rooting for the Kobolds.

He wanted to see this player get chucked down a flight of stairs or two.

After a few minutes of observation, his wish was partially granted, as Kirito saw the player overextend on one of their linears, and get blindsided.

The player was thrown to the ground in a heap.

Kirito grinned.

Though if he were being honest, it would have been even better if they had gotten a swift backhand instead. That would have been even funnier. He had seen the Kobolds do that every now and then back in the beta.

But he supposed that this would have to do instead.

' _Serves him right.'_

Satisfied, Kirito turned back around and continued towards the boss room.

A few steps later, however, he saw something out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped.

A highly specific feeling went through him in that moment.

It was one of those: ' _I'm absolutely certain of what I just saw in my peripheral vision but at the same time, I don't want to turn towards it to confirm what I saw,'_ sort of feelings.

So he continued to stare ahead, as the battle continued off to his left, in the corner of his eye.

It would be so much easier to just keep walking.

He really _should_ keep walking.

This player had been here for 12 hours at least, and was still alive. What would the odds be that they would be overwhelmed and killed at almost the exact moment that Kirito happened to be passing through?

They'd be fine.

Kirito took another step forward.

He heard the almost dead Kobold that had slammed into the wall a moment ago, regain its feet and run towards the rapier user to re-join the battle.

Kirito took another step.

Then he stopped and turned around.

' _God dammit.'_

He should have kept walking.

Kirito immediately recognized the monsters in the area. There were multiple different types of Kobolds in the dungeon, and this specific type he was seeing running towards the rapier user only showed up during monster raids. They didn't have spawn points, so they only showed up in these exact, highly specific conditions. They were also a bit stronger, and had a slightly wider variety of attacks.

There weren't many of them though. There were actually surprisingly few. Far less than what he'd expect from an actual raid.

There were only a dozen or so. So this small group of special Kobolds had probably gotten separated from the main raiding party at some point in the maze of hallways and had gotten lost. Somehow ending up here.

They quickly advanced towards the rapier user and attacked from all directions.

At first, the rapier user did pretty well. But Kirito noticed something that was pretty concerning. The player was stumbling around. The player would attack, or counter, and then struggle to even stay upright after, let alone fight.

It reminded Kirito of someone who had just run a marathon, trying to immediately stand up and fight someone.

They just looked dead tired.

' _Why the hell hasn't this guy left yet?'_

It was such a stupid idea to keep fighting when you were this tired. Not unless your life was on the line, anyways.

Despite this exhaustion however, the player put up a pretty decent fight, managing to take down half of the group before receiving a backhand for real.

As much as Kirito had wanted to see that happen earlier on, things were a bit different now, so it was nowhere near as satisfying to see as he had hoped.

Because there was a real chance that this player was about to die in front of him. And as annoying as they were, Kirito didn't want to see that.

' _Pull out a teleport crystal,'_ Kirito urged the player in his head.

The player struggled to regain their feet, but was immediately knocked back down.

The Kobolds raised their weapons in preparation for the final attack.

Kirito widened his eyes.

' _This guy is really about to die here.'_

The rapier wielder tried to raise their weapon to block, but it was easy to see that it would not be good enough to save them.

The player's arms were shaking, and they had pretty much slumped onto the ground in exhaustion.

It was the end for them.

* * *

The weapons descended toward the rapier user. But then all eight remaining monsters were annihilated as Kirito stepped in.

He had spun into the group, killing the ones closest to the player in an instant, whirling like a buzzsaw.

His feet touched the ground, and he chained into another spin.

He was a hurricane, and the rest of the Kobolds stood no chance whatsoever.

The final targets of his were a good distance away. He leapt and spun, and it took him almost a full three seconds of rapidly whirling through the air to finally cover the distance to his final target. In that time, he had counted seeing the ground 15 times.

That distance had actually pushed the boundaries for how far a range he could actually stretch out a single spin for. He had jumped probably close to 20 meters across the ground, spinning all the while, finally hitting his last targets.

He kicked off the chest of the last Kobold, and backflipped off of it, landing a few meters away from the rapier user.

The whole battle after Kirito's intervention had taken a little under 5 seconds.

He turned to face the player he had saved. But Kirito didn't intend to say anything. If he had been green, he probably would have tried to convince them that what they had done was stupid, but he had no intention of even saying a word.

He didn't even plan to ask them if they were okay. It wasn't necessary. He could get that information with a glance, and then he'd just walk away.

That had been the plan before they had locked eyes anyways.

Well, ' _locked eyes'_ wasn't quite accurate. Kirito had his identity protections up so neither his cursor or his face were visible. He was just an anonymous person with a blackened face, in a full body cloak. But if these protections had not been in place, then they would have been looking into each others' eyes.

But Kirito could see this player's face.

 _Her_ face.

Because this was a girl. A really, really, beautiful one at that. In fact, Kirito was pretty sure he had never seen a person this attractive in person before.

Why was someone like this playing SAO?

But alas, Kirito still planned to turn and leave. This player was a weird anomaly for sure, but Kirito certainly still had no intentions of striking up a conversation with her. Maybe in different circumstances he would have.

So he turned away without a word. Then he started walking away.

"Why did you do that?" The girl asked, just as Kirito was about to head out.

Kirito froze.

Slowly, after a few seconds, he turned back around, slightly surprised.

Was this person seriously talking to him? He hadn't had a sudden, unplanned conversation with an actual human being for almost a month now. All of his talks with Agil and Timely had been extensively planned out long in advance. For a moment or two, Kirito had almost forgotten how to actually talk to a stranger.

"Do what?" Kirito eventually replied.

He supposed it wasn't too risky just talking to this girl. If she mentioned his missing cursor even once, though, then all bets were off. He'd ditch her on the spot if that happened.

"Step in and save me. You didn't have to. I didn't ask you to either."

' _Well isn't this person just a bundle of joy,'_ Kirito thought, sarcastically.

This was probably going to be an annoying conversation.

"I see. You're one of _those_ people, aren't you," Kirito replied, emphasizing the ' _those'_.

He didn't care if he sounded like a jerk. Something about the total anonymity that he had, removed all of the social stigma of speaking his actual thoughts, allowing him to be far more blunt and to the point than he otherwise would have been.

He'd never see this person again, anyways. So what did he care what she thought of him?

"What do you mean _those_ people?" The girl replied.

"Is that why you came here?" Kirito asked. "To die?"

"So what if it is?" Was the girl's reply. "We're all going to die eventually. It doesn't matter if it's today or a month from now. You, me, everyone. We all died the second we entered this world."

"Why did you wait so long then?" Kirito asked.

"What do you mean?"

"A few weeks ago, over a thousand players leaped off the edge of the world and killed themselves. Why weren't you among them?"

"Because that isn't how I intend to go out," the girl answered. "Those people were cowards, dying like a bunch of lemmings. I'm going to die on my own terms, and take as many of these stupid creatures with me as I can. At least there's purpose in that."

Kirito chuckled.

He didn't actually find the situation humorous. It was more of a... _surprised_ chuckle. And it just slipped out before he could stop it.

"D-did you just laugh?" The girl asked, astonished.

Clearly the thought of someone laughing at her had thrown her off her game a bit.

"I did," Kirito confessed.

"Why?"

Kirito carefully considered whether or not to continue with this conversation. He was not going to be polite at all if he did. And the girl may even just try to kill him after hearing what he had to say.

But eventually, Kirito decided to continue.

He had just stopped caring about what other people thought.

"I didn't think anyone could be as stupid as you, is all. Because no, there isn't any purpose in that. None whatsoever, actually. In fact, you're a much bigger coward than they were."

"What?! How dare you!" The girl shouted, furious at him.

"You aren't making a difference at all," Kirito claimed. "This area here has already been cleared out by the other players. These monsters here that you're fighting, are _respawns_. They'll just keep appearing endlessly no matter how many of them you kill."

That wasn't true for the last Kobolds she had fought, the ones that had gotten separated from the monster raid, but it was true for the ones she had been fighting earlier.

This territory has been under player control for a long time now. Continuing to fight there would not reduce the overall count of monsters left in the dungeon any further.

"So no, in fact, you aren't doing anything helpful," Kirito concluded. "You're on a hamster wheel, and think you're being a hero by running yourself to death on it. You're not actually doing anything important though. Just making a lot of noise. If anything, you're actually being a nuisance by being here. Because you cause other players, players like me, to get the wrong idea about you. I have now wasted my time to attempt to save someone who I thought needed it."

"If you want to kill yourself then just do it," Kirito continued after a moment. "It takes courage to make that plunge and control your own fate like that. But you aren't doing that. It looks to me like you're too cowardly to make that choice yourself, and are instead putting yourself in a position where you can hope that the world will make it for you."

"At least those people who jumped off the edge of the world had an excuse. They thought they'd wake up in the real world after dying in this place. They were deceived, and it's understandable why they thought that. And in some part of their mind, they all knew that there was a real risk that they would die for real. They walked right up to the veil of death, faced down all of their fears and the unknown, and jumped. Stupid and Ill-informed? Sure. But you can't deny that what they all did takes both conviction and courage."

"You on the other hand… _your_ death will have about as much meaning behind it as the people who die every year by choking to death on ballpoint pens."

"Just… why? People will ask. Nobody will remember you, and nobody will care. And even if they did, they'd just laugh."

"What a waste," he finished.

There was an outraged silence for a few moments after that.

Seeing as how the girl didn't intend to immediately reply, as her jaw was currently agape, Kirito continued on.

"If you want to die fighting, go down that hall right over there," Kirito said as he pointed in the direction he was talking about. "Go die over there. That section hasn't been cleared out yet. So you'll actually be doing something marginally helpful if you do."

"But don't go thinking it makes you some kind of hero."

The girl had just about enough, after that.

"Shut up!" She shouted. "You don't know what it's like! I was never supposed to even be here! My brother was the one that bought this stupid game! I only turned it on because he wasn't around and because I was curious about it!"

"I had a life before all of this! I was on track to getting into a very prestigious school! My whole life had been planned out! And now it's all over just because I put on the NerveGear, the dumbest thing I've ever done!"

"I'm not going to jump off the edge because I'm never going to let anyone be able to say that I killed myself," she declared. "This world will be the one to do that. Akihiko Kayaba murdered me!"

"No," Kirito replied. "Akihiko Kayaba imprisoned you. There's a difference."

"This whole situation here," Kirito continued, gesturing with his hand to refer to the whole world in general, "it made the news. This will have made headlines in every country in the whole world."

"There were probably entire government organizations assembled in order to figure out how to solve this," he said. "There are people right now, probably thousands of them, working around the clock in an effort to break us out."

"Whatever plans you had before being trapped here, sure, they'll probably have to change now. But nobody will fault you for it," Kirito claimed. "Because this wasn't your fault. If we aren't out by now, then we probably won't be out for a while yet. We'll be in here for months. Probably even a few years. But you won't even be twenty when you get out, if you get out."

"There will be plenty of time to catch up to your peers," he pointed out. "It'll be hard. But nobody will ever have any ground to stand on if they try to question you as to why you're a couple years older than the people around you."

"When are you planning on starting a life-long career?" Kirito asked, rhetorically. "Your mid to late twenties? What difference does it make to an employer if you're 27 instead of 24? That's a rounding error. A 3 or 4 year gap only looks shocking when you're still young. As a teenager, that looks like a significant fraction of your entire life. As an adult though, it won't matter to anybody."

"You aren't dead yet. So what would you rather have as your legacy? The girl who died just like the thousands of others? Or the girl who, despite having little to no experience with games whatsoever, and with all the odds stacked against her, pulled herself up and fought and fought and fought, until there was nothing left to fight anymore, and who made it out again back to the real world with her own strength?"

"Dying on your feet is better than dying on your knees, sure. But do you know what's even better than that? Denying your murderer the right to kill you at all."

"Beat that asshole at his own game."

"If you die now, what will your family think? I don't know a thing about them, whether they're nice people, or pieces of garbage. But in any case, they will always wonder in the back of their minds why their daughter had to put that NerveGear on at all. 'What was going through her head?' They will think. And they'll always wonder that, without ever getting any closure."

"And your brother probably blames himself for everything. He'll think to himself: 'If only I hadn't bought that stupid game, my sister wouldn't have had to die.' It will haunt him for the rest of his life."

"You, as the real victim here, aren't obligated to make it out of this world and explain everything to them. You don't technically owe anyone an explanation. You don't have to tell your brother that you never blamed him as it was actually your mistake, not his, like any decent person would. Because not all people are strong enough to keep themselves together in these sorts of situations."

"But don't you want to at least try?"

"My brother…he wouldn't," the girl replied.

"Oh he definitely would," Kirito interrupted. "Because if my sister was in your position, and I was in the outside word, that's exactly what would be going through my mind. Brothers are just like that."

"But it wasn't his fault," she said.

"And you think he'll see it that way?"

"You don't have to die today," Kirito declared. "You don't have to die today, and you don't have to die tomorrow."

"Every single day from now on, just... have one goal. Tell yourself: 'Just one more day.' If you feel like offing yourself again, just tell yourself that."

"I'll wait 24 hours first, and decide then."

"And if you keep making it… If you keep succeeding in putting off your death just one more day, then one day, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, you might just wake up in a hospital bed with a whole lot of people that you care about waiting for you on the other side."

"But, we can't make it," the girl replied, tears in her eyes. "There's no way we can win."

She sounded completely hopeless.

"Why's that?" Kirito asked.

"So many people have died already," she pointed out. "We haven't even made it past the first boss. We still have a hundred more to go."

"You're right," Kirito agreed. "But here's the part that you left out."

"This world is a game filled with gamers of all kinds. Because there is no player replacement, nobody new is able to log in and our population will only ever decrease over time. That part is true."

"But there is a population mechanism at play here as a result. All of the people who thought the situation was hopeless, have already gone off and killed themselves. There are still a few here and there scattered around, people who are on the fence about it like you are, but everyone who truly believed that is gone."

"There will no longer be any more mass suicides since everyone who had the ability to convince themselves into doing that have already done so. So almost everybody left is strong enough to continue on."

"It's natural selection at work. As time goes on, the death rate will just go down and down. The majority of people who died were people who had no hope. One day, if you decide to stick around, you will find yourselves surrounded by thousands of players who all work together with one goal in mind."

"People will adapt, and once we get through the first boss, the next one will go down just a little bit quicker."

"By floor 5 or so, these boss battles will start becoming routine."

"It's a faulty assumption thinking that because it took a month to get rid of the first floor boss that it will take another month to take down the second. Everyone's just being cautious. Wait for everyone to get their footing before you give up on them."

"Do you… do you really think we can win?" The girl asked, sounding as if she was really trying to believe him, but just couldn't yet.

"It isn't a matter of if," he said. "One day, I _will_ make it out. That's simply a fact. The only variables are how long will it take, and who will still be alive with me at the end. If you happen to still be alive by then, then you will have a free pass to the other side. As will everyone else still alive at the time. Even if you never do anything to help and stay inside the starting town and wait all the way until that day."

"How can you be so sure?" she asked.

"Because I have something I still need to do out there," Kirito replied.

' _That was the longest monologue I've ever given another person. And more than I've ever said to anyone in my entire time in here,'_ Kirito thought to himself.

It left a sour taste in his mouth.

He was so done with this conversation. He had said his piece, and now he was going to leave this girl here.

He wasn't the sort of person that was good at convincing people to not off themselves. This girl needs like... a therapist or something, for that. Some sort of professional.

Kiirito had already contemplated doing that himself a good amount already. Back during those first few days of the death game. And there probably wouldn't have been anything anyone else could have said to make him suddenly realize it was a bad idea after all. He had needed to come out of that state of mind himself.

So if he tried to preach to this person too much, he'd just be a massive hypocrite.

In fact, he was pretty sure he already was one.

She'd do what she wanted anyways, in the end. No matter what he said to her.

Well… maybe he could try one last thing.

"Here, take these," Kirito said after a few moments of silence.

He fished through his inventory for a few moments.

Pulling out a bag, he tossed it over to the girl.

"W-what's this?"

"Cookies." He had picked them up at the market earlier.

"In this world," he continued, seeing her confusion, "you can eat as much junk food as you want without having to worry about getting sick, or getting fat."

"Stand up, walk out of the dungeon, and go to this location," Kirito stated, as he opened up his map and projected it in front of her.

He pointed to a spot on the other side of the floor. A place he had been to once before. Back during the beta.

"There's a farmhouse here, and if you're lucky, nobody else will have it rented out yet. There's a bath there, and unlimited free milk. So rent the place out for a few nights, stuff your face with sweets, take a bath, go to sleep, and ask yourself what you want to do when you wake up."

"Here's enough money for a week at that place," Kirito said as he tossed a small bag of cor over to her.

"Wha-? I can't just take all of this!"

"Sure you can."

"W-why?"

"Because you never know what the future holds. One day, you might just end up being the key to breaking us all out of here."

' _Probably not,'_ he amended in his head.

But, to be fair, he didn't know just who the important decision makers later on in the game will be.

This girl may end up as one of them. So it'd be a shame if she died early on when there was a chance he could have stopped it.

Having said all he wanted to say, Kirito turned and started walking away again.

"T-thank you."

"Go help someone," Kirito called back over his shoulder. "Save a life or two. We'll call it even."

* * *

Huh.

That was unexpected.

She had actually _thanked_ him?

Kirito had expected her to bitch at him.

But, whatever.

He put it out of his mind.

It'd be interesting to see if she made it. Maybe he'll pass her on the street one day in a couple of months.

But before then, he had to first make sure that he made it until then himself.

He had to take down this boss now.

* * *

Kirito stood in front of the boss door. His hand was on it, and he was ready to open it up. Nobody was around to stop him, and all he had to do was push.

He took a deep breath and sighed. Then he started mentally counting down from 30.

He told himself that when he reached zero, he _would_ open the door.

Kirito took several more deep breaths as he counted down.

Once he reached zero, he was ready. He opened the door, and stepped inside.

* * *

The first thing Kirito did as he stepped inside the dark room, was look off to his left where the switch to lock the boss door was.

He located it quickly and easily enough, and wasted no time in pressing it.

The massive door closed again, and locked in place.

This would leave any would-be crashers outside, but would also lock himself inside.

With that done, Kirito silently drew his swords.

He prepared his cloak switches.

He planned out the ordering of the potions he would drink.

He equipped all of his items, and started walking forwards.

He started slowly advancing towards the boss.

Kirito was in no rush. The room was still incredibly dark, but he could still see the outlines of all the objects inside. He could see the pillars, the walls, and of course, the boss himself right at the very end.

He advanced straight down the center of the room. As if he were calmly taking a walk.

There Illfang was, sitting in his chair right at the end of the room. The minions had not yet spawned into the game. Though they would shortly, Kirito expected.

As soon as he got close enough, the lights in the room would turn on, and the fight would begin. He had seen this all happen before, so he knew what to expect.

It would happen any moment now.

Nonetheless, Kirito continued forwards, waiting for the moment where it would all begin.

He took another handful of steps. The grim expression on his face morphed into a grin. He lowered his body, and prepared to launch into a sprint.

But then he was stopped by a beep.

Instead of sprinting, Kirito took a single step forwards and then stopped walking. He didn't move. Not after hearing and recognizing that beep.

He continued to dumbly stare ahead. Frozen in place with an eerie smile on his face as his brain tried to process the sheer magnitude of revelation that he had just encountered… because of that beep.

Kirito spent the next 30 seconds staring straight ahead, before eventually moving his gaze towards his feet.

He could still see the thing in the corner of his eye. The thing that had caused him to freeze. But he had not yet summoned the courage to actually focus his gaze on it.

He knew exactly what it was though.

The source of the beep.

Eventually, Kirito decided that it was time. So he slowly and robotically turned his gaze from the ground to his menu to confirm what he had heard.

When entering the boss room, Kirito had forgotten to take down his camouflage.

As a result, he was still technically invisible.

But the way that his camouflage worked was that it had a Hide Rate. So anything with a Searching level, could damage that rate and potentially reveal him to the world if that rate got low enough.

But there was a threshold. While he was hiding, he could see where his Hide Rate was. So he could tell when someone was using Search on him by observing how it lowered. But if his Hide Rate got low enough, it could meet this threshold and a beep would sound out. It acted as a warning to basically say: ' _Be careful. Something is either looking at you, or you are in a poor hiding spot.'_

A beep.

A beep that only he could hear would sound out when something was damaging his Hide rate a significant amount.

The thing that Kirito had noticed in his peripheral vision, the thing that had caused all of this, was his Hide Rate had lowered. It had gone down to about 50%, in fact.

But _here's_ the thing that overturned his whole view of the world.

It had not hit 0.

He was still technically hidden and nobody could see him. Monster or otherwise.

The room was still dark.

The boss was facing him down. But Illfang could not see him. Kirito was _hiding_ from the boss. Illfang did not know that anyone else was in the room.

And a whole bunch of pieces clicked into place in Kirito's head, in that moment.

All of this time, Kirito had just assumed that a boss room would activate after a player took a certain number of steps inside it. That was always what seemed to happen, after all.

But now it was clear. This was not how it worked at all. Boss rooms did not automatically activate. When a boss room's lights all turned on, that only happened when the boss had located the players inside its domain.

It was therefore possible, with a high enough Hiding level, and while being super careful, to enter a boss's domain without activating it.

Nobody had ever tried entering a boss room on their own before.

As a result, nobody had ever tried hiding from a boss either.

Nobody had ever, or would ever, notice this detail until someone finally decided to enter a boss room on their own.

And Kirito had figured this out totally by accident.

So he spent the next minute or two, just trying to process the implications of this idea.

Eventually, while still staring straight ahead, Kirito began walking backwards the way he came.

All of his plans had changed in an instant.

He walked backwards. And he kept walking backwards until his back touched the closed boss door he had just come through a few minutes ago.

He stopped for a moment, back against the massive door, then turned 90 degrees towards his left, and started walking towards the corner of the room.

This corner was almost completely obscured from the boss's vision because all of the pillars were in the way.

So Kirito walked towards it, and upon reaching it, he laid down on his stomach as quietly as possible, and then started slowly crawling across the floor.

The idea was to advance along the wall, behind the pillars that ran along the entire span of the room, and get behind the boss.

He had no ultimate goal behind this plan of his. He was mostly just curious to see if he could do it.

Since the boss room had not activated yet, the minions had not spawned either. As a result, there were only 2 beings currently in the room. Illfang, and himself.

Kirito took another look at his Hide Rate.

It was almost full, now.

It had raised significantly now that he wasn't in the dead center of the room in plain sight, and was lying prone behind cover instead.

He advanced at a very slow rate along the wall of the room.

His intention was to remain as silent as possible.

Kirito could not afford to waste this chance at getting valuable information about how floor bosses worked. So he was extremely careful. Far more so than he probably needed to be.

He did not want the boss room to activate yet.

It took him about 5 minutes to make it to the first obstacle on his journey.

About 80% of the way down the room, there was a small ledge, and a staircase that lead to the raised ground that Illfang's throne was on.

That was where the cover thinned out. But Kirito had no choice but to climb this ledge if he wanted to make it to his objective.

Kirito peeked over it.

He could hear the boss's breathing, he was so close.

But Kirito continued on.

He climbed up the ledge as silently as he could, and proceeded on.

He did not go straight towards the boss, but tried to make it to the opposite corner of the room from where he had started from. If he made it there, he would be able to turn, and follow the back wall until he made it directly behind Illfang's throne.

His goal was to see if he could make it there without being spotted.

Climbing the ledge, Kirito's Hide Rate lowered slightly, and it remained there as he silently advanced.

Then he made it to the corner of the room.

Illfang's breathing was much louder now.

Then Kirito tried something bold. He stood up.

His Hide Rate did not lower. Kirito knew why, as well. He was actually further back in the room than Illfang himself, was.

Illfang was closer to the boss room door, the door Kirito had originally entered from, than Kirito himself was now.

He was behind the boss. That was how far he had made it without being spotted.

And so Kirito could walk unimpeded right behind the boss's throne as long as he made no sound doing so.

Kirito was directly behind the throne now, so there was no way Illfang could see him.

If Kirito reached out his hand, he could touch the back of the throne.

Still the room had not activated.

Taking a silent step back, Kirito simply marveled at what had just happened.

He had successfully snuck past the boss.

So now it was time to see what he could do with this information.

He could get in a few cheap shots in on the boss if he wanted to, but it probably wouldn't do very much damage. And then the room would activate and the fight would proceed as normal.

But Kirito had a few other ideas he wanted to test out first.

The first order of business was to see if he could make it to the next floor without a battle at all. To see if he could sneak through the door.

He was highly skeptical that this would be possible, but he wanted to give it a try, just to be sure.

So he walked towards the door to the next floor to see if it would open.

He silently pushed on it a few times, but it remained locked, as expected.

' _Oh well. It was worth a try.'_

Kirito turned back towards the back of Illfang's throne and stared at it for a few moments.

And then it happened again. While staring at the back of the throne, Kirito nearly dropped his jaw at what he saw. He had seen something that again, overturned his view of the world. Once again, it took Kirito a few full minutes to process it. So he stood there, invisibly, mouth gaping in astonishment as he tried to process the new information.

Illfang's main weapon. His giant axe. It was resting on the side of the throne. Moreover, Illfang himself was not holding onto it.

Kirito pulled an item out of his inventory as an absolutely wild idea ran through him. Looking down at the item, he considered all sorts of ideas related to it.

A teleport crystal.

Illfang's Giant axe. His _unguarded_ Giant axe.

And a teleport crystal.

Kirito shifted his gaze a few times between these two objects.

The gears turned in Kirito's head.

* * *

' _No. It won't work,'_ Kirito realized.

If he stole the axe and teleported with it, even if he succeeded in taking it to the Town of Beginnings, the fact remained that he'd end up in the Town of Beginnings with a gigantic axe that he probably couldn't carry.

That would certainly attract some attention.

And since he didn't want such attention on him, even if the idea itself was possible, it was still a bad idea.

His thoughts shifted to his ring's teleportation effect next.

He had a ring charge that he could use. But only one. If he used it, he would have to spend over an hour just to make it back to the labyrinth. And then another 30 or 40 minutes to make it to the boss room door again.

That was a lot of time to waste.

Was it worth it?

Was trying to teleport with Illfang's axe with his ring worth that time loss?

' _No wait, this won't work either,'_ Kirito realized a moment later.

It took several minutes for his ring's effect to activate. Minutes in which Kirito could not move, or else the ring would cancel its effect.

If he stole the axe, he was almost certain that Illfang would immediately wake up. So he wouldn't have this time.

He would have to try that idea out on a boss in the future. It was too risky to use it on this one with the tight timeline he was on.

If the other players hadn't been on his tail, he probably would have given it a go. But he couldn't risk it now.

But that didn't mean he couldn't still try and steal the axe at all. He could still try to seperate it from the boss.

Maybe he could grab it and toss it across the room to prevent Illfang from picking it up immediately. Then Kirito could wail on the boss for a couple of minutes while Illfang was unarmed. That'd probably do some serious damage.

With this idea in mind, Kirito mentally prepared for the boss to suddenly wake up at what he was about to do, and then he slowly lowered himself until he was lying prone on the ground again.

He silently crawled towards the throne.

He was far more careful now than he had been earlier on since he was so much closer to the boss.

He had no doubt that he was moving slower than a snail, as he silently approached from behind.

It took him over 3 minutes to cover a distance of just a couple of meters.

Crawling right up to the side of throne, he reached out with his hand ever so slowly, and gently touched the handle of the giant axe.

The instant he made contact, he was totally sure that Illfang would wake up screaming and lunge at him.

But it didn't happen.

Kirito took a look at his Hide Rate again, and noticed that it was still extremely high.

And this initially confused him. Was his Hiding level really so high that he could remain invisible while laying down almost right next to the boss?

Kirito noticed something strange a moment later.

He was probably three feet away from Illfang at this moment. If Illfang simply turned his head to the right, Kirito would without a doubt be spotted instantly.

But Kirito noticed that this probably wasn't going to happen any time soon. Because it wasn't just the case that Illfang's eyes were closed. He was asleep.

Kirito's Hide Rate wasn't decreasing because of the boss seeing him, it was decreasing based off of the noise he was making.

It had not been necessary to crawl along the wall of the room. He could have just walked silently.

To test this idea out, Kirito stood up as slowly as he could. Then he silently walked in front of the throne.

Illfang's eyes remained shut.

* * *

' _Why has nobody ever thought to do this?'_ Kirito thought to himself as he tried lifting the axe without making a sound.

It was heavy.

It took him almost 5 minutes of careful experimentation on the amount of strength he needed to use to pick the thing up off the ground.

The hardest part of the affair was to do it without making the tiniest noise.

As soon as the axe was in the air, the situation almost immediately turned into a game of Operation. No part of the axe was allowed to touch either the throne, or the floor again. If it did, it would make a sound and wake up the boss.

So it became an agonizing game that took up all of Kirito's willpower in order to slowly maneuver the axe towards the back wall.

' _There is no rush,'_ he told himself for the hundredth time as the minutes ticked by with him barely making any progress at all.

' _Slow and steady.'_

Once he made it to the back wall, Kirito slowly walked along it, axe held high above his head, in the hopes of making it to the corner of the room. From there, he intended to retrace his steps all the way back to the boss room door.

It was going to be a _long_ walk.

The entire time, he was trying to imagine what this would look like to a spectator.

Was the axe just floating through the air right now, since he himself was invisible?

Or did the axe disappear with him as soon as he picked it up?

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Kirito let out a sigh of relief as he set the axe down on the ground.

He had carefully experimented with making progressively louder and louder noises while standing at the entrance of the room, just to see how it affected his Hide Rate. Since he was so far away, Kirito could walk around without a care and still not wake up Illfang.

As a result, he could run a few tests with this axe.

Picking it up, the first thing he tried to do was see if he could put it in his inventory.

Unfortunately, this didn't work.

The system didn't really consider it to be an item. It was part of the environment. But at the same time, it probably did have some sort of stats on it. Kirito just couldn't see them. Maybe if he had had an appraisal skill he could have...

The next test was to see if he could wield it himself and swing it around.

And this actually did work to some extent.

He could lift it up and swing it around, but he couldn't really do so very quickly.

His avatar's body was far stronger than his normal human one was, so even though the weapon was bigger than he was, he could still carry it.

It was really heavy and hard to move around, though.

And he had no idea how useful it would be. He had no way to test out its strength without hitting something with it. But since he had locked himself inside this room, he couldn't leave without teleporting. There was no unlock button. And so he partially regretted hitting that lock button so quickly upon entering. It would have been cool if he could have instead taken this axe out for a test run on the monsters outside.

Briefly, the idea of trying to teleport with his ring re-entered his mind. Illfang hadn't woken up, so Kirito could afford to wait for a few minutes for his ring to activate without having to worry about being attacked.

It would be a very valuable experiment to see if this idea would work. All sorts of open questions could be answered.

Would Illfang's axe come with him if Kirito teleported? If it did, would Illfang lose his main weapon permanently? Or would the system generate a new one for him? If Illfang did get a new axe, did that mean Kirito could repeat this procedure and essentially farm giant axe's this way?

But it took almost 2 hours to get back here.

Every single minute he delayed was another minute closer to the rest of the players crashing him.

' _I can't do it.'_

Kirito simply couldn't bring himself to risk it.

The schedule was too tight. And he still had to leave himself a margin of error in case he failed on his first attempt and had to teleport out.

So Kirito decided that he would try to find out the answers to those questions if he ever tried to solo a boss in the future.

Because he didn't even know if the axe he held in his hands was any good. It may be totally useless in his hands, so spending a ton of time teleporting back and forth to duplicate the item may not even be worthwhile.

He preferred spending his time on ventures that he knew would pay off. Not on giant risks that might not.

So he'd see if he could test it out during this fight to see if it was any good instead.

After swinging the axe around a few more times, he eventually found the technique that worked best for him.

Kirito called it the helicopter technique.

Because that's pretty much what it looked like. He'd pick the axe up, and swing it in a big circle while he twirled around in a single direction continuously like a figure skater doing a spin. As he picked up momentum, he could get the thing moving decently quickly. And then with careful footwork, he could slowly make his way around the room.

And when he hit his max speed, he could feel a good amount of strength in the weapon.

Kirito absolutely wanted to test it out on something now.

But it brought up even more questions as he continued to test it out.

This thing belonged to the boss. So would it vanish when Illfang was defeated? That was what happened to weapons that bosses were holding when they were defeated. Would the fact that a player had stolen a defeated boss's weapon to use it themselves prevent the system from erasing it?

Kirito didn't know the answer to this either, as it was all brand new territory.

Eventually, Kirito decided that he had learned all he could about this particular weapon for the time being, and moved on to his next idea.

Since Illfang was still asleep, Kirito wanted to milk this opportunity for as long as he could.

His next idea was much more bold than his previous one.

When Illfang reached a certain point in his final health bar, he switched weapons to a talwar. That was what happened in the beta, anyways. Currently however, that Talwar was held in a sheath attached to the boss's waist.

This brought up another question. Since Kirito had successfully stolen the axe, could Kirito steal the talwar too? Without waking the boss?

Or had he only succeeded in this endeavor because of the fact that the axe had been propped up against the throne, and not in Illfang's direct possession?

That was the next test he intended to find the answer to.

So Kirito placed the axe down in the corner of the room, the furthest possible place he could find away from Illfang to ensure that the boss would not have access to it if it suddenly woke up, and then Kirito repeated his method from earlier to make it to the throne again.

* * *

This was a much harder task than stealing the axe, Kirito realized almost immediately.

If he moved too quickly, it was all over. But he also had to compensate for the boss's breathing. As Illfang inhaled, the sheath holding the talwar would rise slightly. And similarly, the sheath would fall slightly on every exhale.

If Kirito did not take this movement into account, Illfang would feel Kirito's efforts, and would probably wake up.

The task was made even more difficult since Kirito wasn't lifting straight up like he had with the axe. He had to pull the weapon out of its sheath. And since Illfang was seated, this meant that Kirito had to pull horizontally at an angle. All while supporting the weapon's weight and preventing it from falling.

If the weapon had been as heavy as the axe, there was no way he could have done this. But thankfully, it was much smaller and lighter, so it seemed at least doable.

It would require an incredible amount of finesse, however.

Finesse, patience, but most importantly, commitment.

He could not give up halfway through the effort. He had to commit until the task was done. As soon as the weapon started leaving its sheath, there would be no re-sheathing it.

It was succeed or fail. And there would be no turning back.

So it took a long time to gather his courage to make an attempt. And to mentally plan out the operation.

Then he took a deep breath, and began.

Ever so slowly Kirito inched the talwar out of its sheath.

Kirito was crouched on his knees, and he felt like a stereotypical bandit that you would see in the movies.

But then Kirito froze after seeing the blade of the weapon.

Because it wasn't a talwar at all.

It was a nodachi.

And that reaffirmed Kirito's beliefs that there were differences between the beta, and this new world.

If this small detail was different, maybe there were large differences as well.

With this disturbing thought in mind, Kirito proceeded.

It took almost 10 minutes just to remove the weapon from the sheath without a sound.

As the weapon was finally freed, Kirito managed to catch it before the tip struck the ground. Then he carefully maneuvered it above his head and, just as before with Illfang's axe, Kirito snuck the weapon across the room.

* * *

Kirito blew out a breath of air upon making it back to the door.

That was the most stressful thing he had probably ever done in his life.

All throughout the process he had been totally sure that Illfang would wake up and attack him.

But he made it through.

And now he had a new weapon to test out.

' _This one is much easier to use,'_ Kirito realized as he swung around the nodachi in his hands.

He could swing it around pretty easily. Easily enough that he didn't have to resort to the helicopter technique with it. He could actually use it like a two handed weapon.

It was heavy, and slow, but he could swing it around without too much difficulty.

Of course, he couldn't put it in his inventory. Which certainly sucked. But he could feel that it was a pretty awesome weapon nonetheless. It felt awesome, anyways. Who knew what the stats were like? Or if it even had any stats at all. It could just be a useless chunk of rock in the hands of anyone else except for Illfang.

But Kirito wanted to test it out to be sure.

Putting it down next to the giant axe, Kirito moved on to his next experiment.

* * *

This was the boldest one yet.

His previous two successes had strengthened his resolve to greater heights.

Illfang's shield.

Could Kirito remove it right off the boss's arm?

' _There's no way that this will work,'_ Kirito thought, as he crouched at Illfang's side. The other side, this time. On both previous missions, he had been on Illfang's right. Now he was on the left.

And he was staring at the shield on Illfang's arm.

' _Maybe I shouldn't,'_ Kirito thought. Carefully considering the situation.

This just _looked_ like an impossible task.

Illfang would have to be one massively heavy sleeper to get this to work.

So Kirito spent the next several minutes debating with himself about whether or not he should even try.

But then, after a while, Kirito decided to just give it a shot.

He slowly slid it off his arm.

' _There's no way he won't wake up.'_

Kirito stared in total disbelief as the shield slid fully off Illfang's arm.

Kirito stood there precariously for a few moments with Illfang's shield in his hands. Expecting Illfang to shoot his eyes open and attack him at any moment.

But time continued to tick on, and nothing happened.

The boss didn't wake up.

The room was still dark.

* * *

' _This is a pretty decent shield.'_

It was way bigger than a normal shield. He couldn't put it in his inventory, but it was surprisingly light despite its size. And he could easily make use of it.

He felt invincible behind it. As if he could stop a tank round with the thing.

Kirito shook his head in disbelief.

' _There are other ways to defeat floor bosses,'_ Kirito realized. Players didn't have to just run in and fight. They could sit back and use their heads. They could come up with clever solutions.

A single player even had the potential to take one down.

You could sneak in and screw around with the boss while they were asleep. You could steal their weapons and equipment.

Though to be fair, Kirito was almost sure that what he had just managed to do wouldn't work on the bosses on the higher floors. This boss was supposed to be easy. And so Kayaba had probably programmed it to be a decently heavy sleeper in the off-chance that someone had had the same idea that Kirito did.

This game was designed to reward creativity and thinking outside the box.

And this made Kirito consider all sorts of new plans and ideas about the bosses on the higher floors.

Even on this floor, how easy would the boss be to defeat if someone stole all of their equipment like Kirito just had, and then joined back up with a full raid group of players for an assault?

It'd be so easy. And it made him regret the fact that he was orange even more. If only he could collaborate with the other players…

He sighed.

* * *

It took Kirito almost an hour to set everything up.

He had had another last minute idea.

He was going to use the boss's weapons against it.

So he had used some rope from his inventory to tie the nodachi to his back and had silently climbed up one of the pillars with it.

The pillars were all connected by giant concrete slabs at the top. It was a bit like Stonehenge, how they were set up. There were the vertical pillars, and then horizontal ones that were laid horizontally on top, bridging the gap between them. However, the horizontal slabs at the top of these pillars in this room were much thinner than the vertical ones.

They were like a balance beam covering the entire length of the room. So Kirito could climb a pillar close to the boss door, and walk all the way across the room, along this thin beam, to any of the pillars close to the boss.

The only thing he could not do was switch sides of the room.

If he climbed a pillar on the right side of the room, there was no way to cross over to a pillar on the left side of the room without climbing down. There was no bridge in that direction. So he could only travel lengthwise down the room.

By tying the nodachi to his back before climbing up, Kirito had lugged the weapon up with him, and then he had carried it across the balance beam all the way to the other side of the room. Within jumping range from the boss.

He was going to jump from the sky and land on the boss with it.

Then he'd initiate the next phase of his plan with the axe.

His assault was a multistage operation meant to test out the effectiveness of both of the weapons he had stolen, and hopefully, to deal out massive amounts of damage.

Kirito had spent almost half an hour coming up with a plan to make all of it work. And another half an hour to position everything.

He was ready to test it all out now.

He took a deep breath, and went over all of it again.

Then, when he was ready, he deactivated his camouflage with a sword skill.

* * *

Kirito had to begin his attack by first building up as much rotational momentum as he could.

To achieve this he had to spin. Fast.

So he had equipped all of his items, had drank a full set of all of his potions, equipped his first cloak for his cloak switch, and then he had activated his death spin.

The hardest part in the strategy was the fact that he was doing it on something as thin as a balance beam, while the room was dark. One wrong step and he'd fall to the ground. It wouldn't kill him if this happened, but it would ruin his plan, and all of his preparations.

After this first spin, he activated a second.

He was able to preserve much of his rotational momentum from his first spin, so the second one allowed him to go a bit faster.

The third spin allowed him to go faster still.

He couldn't keep this up indefinitely however. Once he made it to spin number 5, it became impossible to go any faster. The windows were just too small for him to react to in time to initiate a 6th spin at the exact right moment to continue the process.

On spin number 5 however, in a highly precise movement, Kirito put away both of the swords that he was wielding into his inventory with a pair of gestures, and simultaneously picked up the stolen nodachi that he had strategically placed on top of the pillars for exactly this purpose. It had been laying on its side, on top of the concrete balance beam.

With all of this built up rotational momentum, the nodachi was picked up off the ground with almost no effort.

Then Kirito jumped off the ledge.

That combination of movements… putting away two swords, picking up the nodachi, and jumping, all while spinning blindingly fast on a balance beam, in the darkness, was so complicated that there was no way he would have ever been able to do it without all of his death spin training, and his acrobatic combat experience.

If the Kirito from the beta test had seen him now, he would have dropped his jaw in astonishment at the sheer precision that he had just demonstrated.

For the next second or two, Kirito found himself rapidly spinning through the air like a buzzsaw with all of this built up momentum. Only, the weapon in his hand was the giant nodachi he had stolen from the boss earlier, instead of his standard pair of swords.

He was rotating so quickly with the giant blade that he could hear the sound of the displaced air constantly whooshing around him as he fell towards the ground.

The boss had, incidentally, woken up after hearing the consecutive sword skills activating.

The lights turned on in the room while Kirito was spinning towards his target, and the boss prepared to stand up and move.

But only a few seconds had passed since Kirito had activated his first spin, and so the boss had not had time yet to actually get off his throne.

Kirito summoned up all of his experience with his rapid spins, and changed his angle of attack with the new weapon as he spun through the air towards the boss.

He rarely ever spun this quickly before. Not outside of random experiments, anyway. And he had never spun with a weapon this big and heavy before, either.

The force behind this attack was going to be astounding.

And the target was the center of Illfang's forehead.

The boss did not have a shield to block this attack.

Kirito would come down from the sky with this massively heavy weapon, while spinning far faster than he had any right to, with all of his strength boosts and agility boosts, and strike the boss at a weak point, hopefully dealing massive damage.

But the real purpose behind it was to set the stage for the second phase of his opening assault.

A little over five seconds had elapsed in total between Kirito's first spin on top of the pillars to the thunderous impact of Illfang's own nodachi striking him blade first in the face.

Kirito's stolen nodachi sank deep into the boss's flesh with the attack, and a massive crash and shockwave sounded throughout the room as the weapon came to a halt.

The blow was absolutely _devastating_ due to the rapid spin, and the ground shook from the impact of it.

Without wasting any time at all, Kirito entered the next phase of his opening attack.

Letting go of the nodachi's handle, Kirito immediately pulled out two of his strongest Anneal Blades, and planted them both into Illfang's eyes, as the boss roared in agony.

SAO was programmed so that all monsters had weak points. Eyes were a pretty common one across monsters everywhere. And if a solid hit was landed in such a location, the enemy would often receive a blindness debuff that would massively decrease its combat effectiveness.

This made the eyes one of Kirito's first targets in this situation. And since he was so close to the boss that he was practically standing on it, there was no way he could have missed.

With the swords in place, Kirito twisted them inside Illfang's eye sockets, then he planted both of his feet on the front of the throne, right between Illfang's legs, and pushed off with all of his strength, while pulling down with his swords.

He activated a sword skill with one of them to build up the extra momentum he needed.

With all of his potion enhanced strength, and with the extra boost from the sword skill, Kirito flipped Illfang right off his chair, and over his head.

Illfang was monstrously heavy. But not heavy enough to prevent Kirito from flipping him over.

Letting go of the sword handles, leaving them inside Illfang's eye sockets, Kirito did a backflip and landed right next to the giant Kobold, as the boss crumpled onto the ground in a heap.

At this moment, Illfang had a pair of swords impaled in him, one through each eye, and a nodachi was impaled through his stomach. It had sunk so far down through his head that it found itself there.

Kirito had nearly vertically bisected him. It was only due to the fact that this was a game world that prevented Illfang from dying right there.

Next up was the final phase of Kirito's opening assault.

Kirito had placed the giant axe right where he had landed in advance, having planned out this exact sequence of maneuvers. Immediately picking it up, Kirito started picking up speed with the helicopter technique.

The idea behind this final phase was to dish out as much damage as humanly possible to the boss.

Illfang was currently seated on his ass, with his arms supporting him from behind because of the flip.

This was the exact position that Kirito had wanted to put the boss in because it would allow the helicopter technique to be twice as effective as it would otherwise be.

Spinning around and around with the giant axe, Kirito quickly picked up speed and maneuvered to the space between Illfang's right arm, and his back.

This allowed him to strike the boss twice on every full rotation instead of just once.

As he spun around, he'd first hit Illfang's side, and then he would hit Illfang's right arm in the same rotation. Then the rotation would continue and he would hit Illfang's side again, and then Illfang's right arm again. And this would repeat over and over again for as long as Illfang remained seated in that position.

This effectively doubled the amount of damage he dealt to the boss.

So Kirito spun around and around as quickly as he could.

Whenever Illfang tried to move, Kirito would move with him to continue his assault.

Kirito had no idea how effective this assault would be when Illfang finally recovered from it. He didn't have the time to take a look at the boss's HP as he spun around.

But Kirito's grin grew wider and wider as he continued to spin.

Eight spins went by and still Illfang had not been able to get to his feet. By carefully maneuvering himself, Kirito had been able to knock him back down every time he tried to get up.

Fifteen spins went by, by the time Illfang finally managed to leap to safety.

Thirty hits in total.

Without giving Illfang a single second to recover, Kirito finally threw the giant axe he had been spinning around with, straight at the boss.

It struck the dead center of Illfang's body and bowled him over again, and then Kirito immediately drew his next pair of swords and charged.

The minions spawned in a moment later.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Salvia Officinalis, Gabriella Gadfly**


	16. Swing

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to DutchHorizon for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Without wasting a single second, Kirito launched into a death spin.

The 3 minions who had spawned were eliminated.

Illfang was still collecting himself, so Kirito intended to capitalize on this moment by dealing as much damage as humanly possible. With this in mind, he rushed into melee range and started his assault.

Attack after attack landed without issue, but Kirito was forced to back off slightly once Illfang started swinging his arms around. Blinded, the boss had resorted to randomly flailing in Kirito's general direction with his fists. It was easy to avoid the attacks, but it forced Kirito to ease off.

Hearing more minions spawning behind him, Kirito, for the first time, took a look at the boss's HP gauge.

He wasn't really sure what to feel upon looking at it, however.

Part of him had been hopeful upon starting this battle with the floor boss. With his stolen weapons and his devastating opening combo, some part of Kirito had hoped that maybe this would be a quick and easy fight.

He shouldn't have gotten his hopes up.

The attacks did do a ton of damage, there was no doubt about that. And it proved that using boss weapons was not only possible, but incredibly effective as well.

But Kirito was alone. He was the only person dealing damage, so the amount of damage he dealt out in his opening attack would probably be the equivalent of an entire raid group doing battle with the boss for about a minute or two, but that was the extent of it. This meant that instead of seeing Illfang's HP gauge at 50%, or something unbelievable like that, Kirito instead saw the gauge at about 97%. Only about 2 or 3 percent had been taken out of Illfang's total HP with that attack. Kirito would have to repeat that effort thirty-something more times to kill it, though he couldn't be totally sure about that.

All he could make his estimate off of was the visual indicator, Illfang's health bar. Nowhere did it show an actual percentage value of the amount of HP Illfang had left, so Kirito had to estimate it based on nothing more than the movement of the health bars themselves. And it was made more difficult to get this estimate due to the fact that Illfang had 4 HP bars stacked on top of each other, so there was an added factor of 4 that Kirito had to take into account in his head.

Seeing that the fight was nowhere near over, and with more minions spawning in, he glanced towards the closest pillar and mentally prepared to resort to his original strategy.

But before retreating, he wanted to deal a little more damage and capitalize on Illfang's blindness.

Turning around, Kirito brought his sword up just in time to block a mace from one of the minions. He parried it with a sword skill, launching the Kobold backwards from the sheer force behind it. It was still alive, but now, Kirito had a few seconds to deal some more damage to Illfang.

Until the boss recovered, Kirito would focus all of his attention on it and simply avoid the minions as best as he could.

* * *

The next 60 seconds entailed Kirito doing battle with a blinded Illfang.

He was forced to leap, flip, and spin, in order to position himself properly, away from the unblinded minions that kept rushing at him.

But Kirito was left unsatisfied at the end.

The minions always seemed to know exactly what to do and where to go to prevent Kirito from continuing his attack on the boss, so he had barely managed to sneak in any extra hits.

When Illfang finally managed to pluck the swords out of his eyes and open them up again, Kirito immediately found himself on the back foot.

The first thing Illfang did upon his vision being restored was throw Kirito's own swords right back at him at high speed.

Having expected something like this, however, Kirito was able to dodge the pair of flying Anneal Blades by summoning them back into his hands with a subtle abuse of the item equipping mechanics.

After he had planted those two swords in Illfang's eye sockets earlier, Kirito had left them there and had switched to a new pair of weapons. The ones he had been using since then in the meantime.

By first putting this second set of swords away—with a combination of gestures—he could re-equip his original pair of swords that were being thrown at him. The system would then find those swords in the environment and relocate them into Kirito's hands, which had the side effect of removing them from the dangerous trajectory they were on, rendering the attack useless.

But Illfang did not stop there. He pulled the still impaled nodachi out of his own stomach and then threw _it_ at Kirito next.

It came as a genuine surprise to the solo player. Illfang had never done anything like that in the beta.

Kirito abruptly leaned _way_ back, to the point that he nearly fell over. The blade flew what had to have been just a handful of inches over him. Interestingly enough, after missing Kirito, the nodachi crashed into one of the minions that had been charging towards him from behind.

But only one of them. There had been 6 minions in total. Five of whom were about to be within striking range since the 6th had been blown backwards by the nodachi.

Kirito immediately stood back up.

The minions did not wait in line. They flat out attempted to dogpile him.

Kirito was able to dodge the first minion with a sidestep, who bodily leapt at him, causing the minion to fly off somewhere behind him. He was able to block the second two minions' attacks with his swords, but then he had to get creative to deal with minions 4 and 5, since his hands were full.

Acting on sheer instinct, Kirito dropped his right sword and let it fall towards the ground, and then punched minion number four in the face with his bare hand. He had come up with an incredibly elaborate plan in an instant to block all of the attacks and retake the initiative. In fact, he was so impressed with it that he almost grinned.

But just as his mind was working out the last detail of the plan, he was interrupted.

Kirito would never complete that thought.

* * *

_Something_ struck him from behind.

Though it'd probably be more accurate to say that something _absolutely blasted_ him from behind, because Kirito had never been hit that hard in his life.

He had no idea what it was. Illfang was nowhere near him, and none of the minions could generate a force of that magnitude.

But it was strong.

Kirito's feet left the ground instantly. His vision blurred into a swirl of colours and he lost all sense of orientation and direction.

Then he was in the air _flipping_.

All 5 remaining minions exploded as Kirito's rag-dolling body mowed them all down in an instant.

He hit the ground and _bounced_.

At the speed he was travelling at, gravity did almost nothing to change his trajectory. He might as well have been a laser, and the ground, a mirror. So Kirito's collision with the ground was nearly elastic, having barely slowed him down at all.

In the next half-second after his first bounce, he did somewhere between 30 and 50 unwilling barrel rolls while traveling at a monstrous speed through the air.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kirito spotted crimson red where his health gauge was supposed to be. Considering it was at 100% only a second or two ago, it really gave him some insight into just how hard he had been hit.

His cloak was gone. It had utterly _evaporated_ due to the sheer power of the impact, leaving him in just his normal clothes.

Before he had even consciously understood this fact, his right hand did something almost entirely out of Kirito's control.

It activated his teleportation crystal hotkey, and then instantly activated said crystal.

But there was a delay. Teleport crystals did not activate instantly, so Kirito's avatar would be at the mercy of the laws of physics for the next second or so.

He didn't know it at the time, but he had just been blasted across the entire length of the boss room.

He then collided with Illfang's throne.

Kirito ricocheted off the top of it and had his momentum redirected upwards from the impact.

He slammed into the top of a pillar next, and bounced off of it as well.

He had been struck with so much force that after bouncing off of 3 different surfaces he still had the momentum leftover to smash into the ceiling.

This was the final impact.

There was no question at all that Kirito should have died in that moment.

But just as Kirito's body was crumpling up against the ceiling of the room, the teleport crystal finally activated and he was gone.

He had avoided death by a handful of milliseconds.

* * *

For the next 30 seconds or so, what had just happened to him, getting up from the ground, or running and hiding, didn't once cross Kirito's mind.

All he could do was stare at his right hand, and try to wrap his mind around how it had just saved his life.

He was laying on his back, facing the sky, with his right arm stretched upwards.

It had been totally automatic, pulling out that crystal.

Kirito's mind just kept on replaying that automatic movement over and over again, and he just couldn't believe how quickly his hand had pulled that off.

He, Kazuto Kirigaya, had not done that. He had been too slow to react. The fact that he was still alive was entirely due to the muscle memory built up in his right hand.

Abruptly, Kirito's vision started to blur.

Reaching up to his eyes, Kirito felt tears.

' _Why… am I crying?'_

* * *

Kirito was staring at a log on the ground in front of him, now. He had been doing so for almost an hour, actually. He was seated alone in the middle of the woods on a fallen tree trunk just… _processing_ the previous few hours of his life.

He had no idea what to say or what to think anymore. So he just stared at the log in front of him since it was the only thing that made sense.

Upon arriving at the teleport gate after using his crystal, Kirito had gotten _very_ lucky. Due to the fact that he had been battling Illfang so late at night, there had not been very many people outside when he had appeared at the gate. As a result, only one or two people had seen him before he had managed to collect himself and take off.

And he was pretty sure, not _totally_ sure, but pretty sure, that nobody had noticed his orange cursor.

His Hidden Cursor ability had disabled upon being struck from behind by that unknown attack. Normally, that ability remained active even during combat. But taking an impact with _that_ much force and being launched across a room like that had been enough to fully deplete his hidden cursor's Hide Rate.

His Hiding level had been so high that he had never even dreamed that that was possible to happen. That his cursor could actually be revealed during a fight. The ability's Hide Rate bar was just too large. Nothing short of a coordinated effort by multiple players using Search should have revealed it. But apparently, being _slammed_ from behind was enough to do the job if the hit was hard enough.

So he was hiding in the woods now, because there was a possibility that people were looking for him. A small one, sure, but it was still possible. And he didn't really know what to do anymore.

He let out a sigh as he rested his chin on the pommel of his sword. He had planted the weapon into the ground in front of him, blade first, and was now leaning forwards from his seated position, using it to support some of his weight.

He had a lot to think about.

* * *

' _I think I'm done,'_ Kirito thought after a long while, as he looked up at the sky.

He had gone over the last few moments of his fight with Illfang for the hundredth time in his head. And he was finding it extremely difficult to convince himself to continue fighting and levelling up at all. To convince himself to not just give up entirely on getting stronger, right now. To not quit while he was ahead. While he was still alive.

Perhaps it would just be easier to find some dark corner somewhere and wait out the next couple of years in total isolation. To just retire.

Because he could not believe that he was still alive. He had gotten _so_ lucky to survive something like that that he didn't even know how to comprehend it.

He didn't even know what had happened. He had gotten hit by _something_ , clearly, but what? He had tried for almost an hour to come up with any possible explanation as to how anything in that boss room could have hit him that hard, but he had come up with nothing.

Illfang had been too far away to reach him. Kirito had made sure that this was the case before he had turned away to deal with the minions. He wasn't some amateur that made the mistake of looking away from an enemy at the wrong moment. He had looked away, sure, but only after confirming that there was nothing Illfang could have done to him during that time.

The only explanations that Kirito could even imagine sounded ridiculous to his own ears. Illfang having some sort of super-powered, unknown ranged attack. A second floor boss that was completely invisible that existed inside that room. Some sort of weird bug.

He was grasping at straws because he hadn't seen anything.

He knew very well, however, how lucky he had been. Whatever had hit him should have killed him. If he had been wearing different equipment, weaker equipment, or if he hadn't taken a regeneration potion beforehand, or if any one of a million variables had been different, he'd be dead.

3 HP.

That's what his gauge had said at the end. Never before had his health reached that low without him dying immediately after. Kirito had died a few times back in the beta. But he had never _survived_ something with that few remaining HP.

It was a rounding error. Whether or not he lived or died in that moment came down to some sort of cosmic rounding error.

If literally _anything_ had gone differently...

Kirito's entire life had flashed before his eyes in those few short moments. Everything. All the happy moments, all of his regrets, his friends, his sister…

His entire life had nearly been erased, completely randomly, for no reason. Just… out of the blue. He had been fighting in a pitched battle in one moment, a battle in which everything had been more or less under control, and then he was nearly dead on the ground in the next moment.

And he had had no control of that process. All of his careful planning and preparations had been worthless. It was only thanks to random chance that he was even alive.

' _What the hell am I even doing?'_

Kirito repositioned himself, pressing his forehead into the pommel of his sword this time, and closed his eyes.

He wanted to get out of this game alive, that was all. He didn't need to be a hero, or to save a bunch of people's lives… he just wanted to talk to his sister again. To go home. So maybe it would just be best if he let all the other players continue the fight from here on out.

He was just so _done_ with it.

Let the other players handle the boss. He had been an idiot to even attempt to solo it. It couldn't be done since Illfang just had too much health.

That entire assault of his, using Illfang's own weapons against him, had amounted to almost nothing, in the end. It'd take hours. There was no way he could keep those minions busy without looking away from the boss, and there was no way to look away from the boss without getting hit by some new super-powered ranged attack that Kirito had never seen before.

So, yeah, he was done with it.

Kirito opened up his menu. Then he put his swords away and started walking.

* * *

Kirito slumped down on the ground in his cave. He had needed to clear his head, so he had actually walked there instead of using his leftover ring charge.

This cave was his one refuge from the whole world. It wasn't very luxurious to say the least, but there was a reason why he kept coming back.

It was hard to get to. Even after a month in the game, Kirito had not spotted a single player this far out. That meant that this cave was a location where he could safely rest, which was its only defining feature. Because it was hard to get to, it was unlikely that anyone would find him when he was there.

He himself had nearly missed it the first time he had spotted it. Back on that first day, if he had exited the forest 30 meters to either side, he definitely would have missed it.

It was blind luck that he had found it at all. If he hadn't then marked the position on his map, he never would have found it again either.

It was the first one he had found. The first safe haven. He had been too pressed for time before now to find a new, better location, so he had stuck it out. But now that his schedule had suddenly been completely freed up, maybe he should go out searching again?

He wasn't at the edge of the floor yet. In fact, he had never actually reached it before, now that he thought about it.

The last time he had tried to make it to the edge, he had stumbled upon that Nepenthe quest and had gotten distracted with it. Then he had gone on his Hiding and Mixing grind, and had never made another attempt.

Maybe he should try it again? At least it'd give him something to do.

He kind of wanted to go there now.

He had originally planned to be awake for several more hours, anyway. Fighting Illfang. So he wasn't tired enough to go to sleep.

This time however, Kirito told himself that he wouldn't get distracted.

He'd make it to the edge of the world and take in the view of the unobstructed sky.

Kirito grinned, liking the idea, so he headed out immediately.

* * *

He followed his usual route to the Nepenthe boss, making it to the location that his Ring of Acid always teleported him to.

And then he pressed on, into the unknown.

The whole area was filled with dense trees as he moved further and further out. But it was significantly thinner there than it was on the path he usually took towards Horunka Village.

He could actually move freely without bumping into anything.

Using his map, Kirito had marked a perfectly straight line to the edge of the world, and was navigating along it.

He saw nothing but trees and small clearings the whole way there.

* * *

After walking the final kilometer, Kirito finally found what he was looking for.

A stone wall about 5 meters tall.

He couldn't see anything beyond it since he was standing at its base. But Kirito quickly noticed something that intrigued him. The wall was _only_ 5 meters tall. It didn't extend upwards all the way to the bottom of the second floor.

Did that mean he could climb up on top of it?

Kirito decided to find out.

He backed up a ways, then started sprinting towards the wall. Doing a quick wall run, he vaulted himself on top of the barrier.

He found himself standing on the edge of the world.

* * *

The castle of Aincrad was a strange structure.

It did not consist simply of 100 disks, each containing a floor, all stacked on top of each other.

There were small... _outposts_ , for lack of a better word, that formed a ring around the outside of each floor.

There were places you could go to, along the edge of each floor, that allowed you to step onto a small catwalk that extends out into the void, allowing a player to travel a hundred meters or so away from the confines of the floor itself.

Below these pathways there was nothing but an endless drop.

On the first floor however, these outposts were particularly prominent, and they included large vertical spires that were hundreds of meters tall at the end of each of them.

Players referred to these outcroppings as _outposts_ because there were usually small buildings and lookout towers located on these outer pathways that a player could freely enter.

They served almost no real function, though. There weren't any enemies or items located on them, and they were actually safe zones, allowing players to rest if they happened to find one. That was really their only practical value.

Sometimes one of these outposts would be the closest safe zone on a grinding trip, and players would make their way to them instead of a village or town.

They were the only locations where you could find a gap in the stone wall surrounding each floor as well, meaning that if a player could not scale the 5 meter stone barrier on their own that existed everywhere else along the circumference of each floor, they could not actually jump off the edge of the map unless they walked to one of these outposts, where the wall didn't exist.

There were sixteen of them on the first floor. Sixteen outposts. All evenly spaced around the circumference of the disk.

Kirito himself wasn't anywhere near any of them at the moment. He was actually standing roughly halfway between the two nearest ones. Meaning he was about a kilometer away from the closest. So the wall he was standing on would run a fair distance in either direction before finally running into one of these outposts.

He had had to climb up this stone wall to see what was on the other side of it as a result.

The void.

Stars lit up the sky in front of him in a beautiful display.

But Kirito was quickly distracted from this incredible sight by a random thought appearing in his head.

He took a look off to his left, and then off to his right, while standing atop the wall, and really thought about the thin barrier he was standing on.

It was only about two feet thick.

On one side was the forested floor of floor 1. On the other side, an endless fall towards his death.

But this stone barrier extended along the entire circumference of the floor, and he had come up with an unusual idea after really thinking about this concept.

He opened up his map, and took a long look at it.

Then he started walking off to his right.

He was walking on top of the wall, following where it led.

Since the wall just kept going, theoretically, he should be able to walk the entire circumference of the floor if he wanted to. He could even end up back at his starting point without ever having to turn around if he just kept going.

It'd take a _long_ time, but it was possible.

In fact, he'd even be able to estimate exactly how long since he knew the diameter of the floor. With his current speed, the formula for the circumference of a circle, and the radius, he could figure it out if he wanted to.

He didn't really feel like exerting the mental effort required, though.

He would have to be careful about running into any enemies, or players, and he'd have to make sure that he didn't fall off. But due to the fact that he was travelling next to a thick forest, there shouldn't be any enemies along this arc of the wall, since there was no room for them to spawn in such an environment.

And the trees would obstruct any other player's view of him walking along it.

A lot of the first floor was pretty flat, which meant that if those trees weren't there next to him, players would be able to see a small dot from kilometers away moving along the top of the wall.

At least, they'd see that if his camoflauge wasn't active.

This all meant that it should be possible for him to travel completely unopposed for as long as he wanted to on top of the wall. Well, when he reached the first outpost on his path, he'd have to jump over a short gap since there'd be a hole in the wall there to allow players onto the catwalk. But after clearing it, then he'd have another two-kilometer-or-so stretch of unobstructed walking once again, until the next outpost.

He could definitely make it all the way to the point where the forest ended, which actually wasn't all that far away. In fact, he'd reach that point a little before reaching the first outpost. But when he made it there, he'd then have to worry about monsters knocking him off the wall if he tried to keep going since they'd then have the room to spawn at the base of the wall.

But he sort of had a goal now. And it was the reason why he was on top of this wall, walking in the first place.

Slowly, he picked up speed. Then he broke into a sprint.

There were no obstacles in front of him. He could treat the top of this wall like a highway. Why would that be a good idea? Because by doing so, he could go _around_ the forest that he loathed with a passion.

How many hours had he spent slogging through the woods, going to and from Horunka Village and his cave?

 _That_ path through those trees that he always took was definitely the shortest path to take in terms of distance. But since it was full of such thick vegetation, he could not move faster than a slow walking pace down it, and he had to squeeze through various gaps in the shrubbery all along the way. So it was not necessarily the shortest path to take in terms of time.

If he instead hopped on top of this wall, sprinted along this arc of it until the end of the forest, and then hopped off the wall to continue on towards the village from there, he'd save a ton of time.

This new path was probably 2 or 3 times longer in terms of distance than the old path, but he'd be moving more than 10 times faster down it.

The fastest way to get to the interior of the floor was not to head straight there from his cave. It was to actually go to the edge of the floor first in the complete opposite direction, and then climb the wall and run along this arc of it until the end of the forest where the wide open plains began. The plains that Kirito could sprint through. Only then would he turn towards the interior and jump down.

Why hadn't he thought of trying this sooner?

He wanted to time it out now.

He had a new goal. He intended to run down this new path of his once, just to make sure that it worked the way he thought it would, then he'd run it in reverse back to his cave.

Then he'd repeat the process and time it out to see exactly how much time he'd save by taking this new path.

So he got to work.

* * *

He could run the route in just under 20 minutes at his top speed, he concluded, after running all of his tests. About a quarter as long as his previous route.

He was overjoyed at this new discovery.

He didn't even have to use his ring anymore! Twenty minutes was a short enough time to not really matter to him!

He was such an idiot for not thinking of trying this out sooner! So many hours could have been freed up for other things!

But he found himself in another quandary now, after finishing this self imposed task.

What should he do now?

He was pretty sure he had given up on fighting anything. At least for the time being. He didn't even want to look at his own sword anymore.

He felt lost.

That thrill that he usually got every time he thought about fighting something was just gone. As soon as his thoughts moved in that direction, he'd remember just how well that had worked out last time.

Kirito had been pushing himself all this time, all in the hopes that he might gain the strength he needed to take down Illfang. And it had nearly cost him his life, and any possible meeting with his sister in the future.

He had to admit, nothing had ever quite _realigned_ his goals as quickly as that single hit from whatever the hell that had been, had. When the fucking... hand of god had come down and swatted him.

Before the swat, he had been all gung-ho and ready to take on anything. And then a literal instant later, he had been thinking: ' _You know how we thought it was a great idea to solo a floor boss? How 'bout we don't do that, actually.'_ And he had suddenly gained a deep appreciation for walking through uninhabited forests and staying the hell away from anything even tangentially related to combat.

He was probably going to have a panic attack when he tried to close his eyes next. Or an anxiety attack. Or he'd end up with PTSD.

Even now he could sort of… feel some of that going on in the back of his mind. He was actively shutting down his thought processes the second they started wandering over there.

He was actually pretty sure that he needed to sit down for a little bit.

' _I guess I'll just go back to the cave.'_

He'd figure something out then.

Sitting down somewhere private and quiet was sounding like a great idea.

* * *

Kirito froze when the entrance of his cave came into view. His stomach dropped and a feeling of dread immediately went through him.

He leaped behind the closest tree and drew his weapons.

Someone was in his cave.

Light was coming out from inside it.

Kirito had had his camoflauge up all this time as a habit, so he hadn't been seen or heard by anyone yet.

' _I guess it was just a matter of time until this happened,'_ he thought. Eight thousand people were all cooped up on the first floor, which practically guaranteed that eventually, every nook and cranny would be explored.

Kirito had hoped that it wouldn't happen until the next floor had opened up, however.

He was probably going to have to find a new place to set up his tent now. A new place to hide from the world. A new place to sit down and quietly freak the hell out for a little while.

But first… Kirito wanted to know who these people were, so he held his breath and listened.

* * *

Nothing. He didn't hear so much as a peep even after a few minutes. Had they started a fire and then just left the area? Kirito, still invisible, peeked his head out from behind the tree. Then he pulled out a teleport crystal just in case something happened, and started slowly inching forwards. He went from tree to tree, hiding behind each one, hoping to hear something from inside the cave.

But he still couldn't hear anything.

Kirito could not get any closer to the cave without leaving the cover of the trees, so he was forced to do so a moment later, and he slowly advanced towards the cave entrance from the side.

Even if someone suddenly leaped out of the mouth of the cave with Search active, they wouldn't see him immediately from this angle since Kirito was way off to the side, inching towards the cave from along the cliff face that the cave was burrowed into. That would give him time to get to some cover before being seen, in the worst-case scenario.

Eventually, Kirito reached the mouth of the cave and peeked inside, since he still hadn't heard anything from inside.

Nobody was there. There wasn't even a fire.

What the hell was glowing then?

Kirito advanced into the cave until he found the source of the light.

Even seeing it right in front of him, Kirito didn't know what he was looking at.

The wall of his cave was glowing. It wasn't the whole wall, just the wall at the end.

His cave was shaped like a backwards, lowercase 'r'. It went straight for a bit, then curved to the left and hit a dead end. He was standing at the dead end right now and that was the part that was glowing. The tip of the backwards 'r'.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. He spent a ton of his time in this cave and there was no way he wouldn't have noticed this if it had happened earlier.

Curious, Kirito reached up and touched the glowing wall. As soon as he did, he heard the sound of large boulders moving around, and then the wall opened.

The back wall of his cave had been a door all along.

* * *

Immediately, a huge swath of theories flew through his head at a million miles an hour as he advanced through the newly revealed doorway.

The one that he ultimately settled on as 'most likely' was that this was a timed event that happened extremely rarely. That this was some sort of mini-dungeon that could only be opened on a specific date. Perhaps once a month or so. And only on that day would the entrance glow.

The glow wasn't very intense, either. If it had been daytime, Kirito probably wouldn't have even seen it from outside.

This fact, combined with the fact that this cave was so unbelievably hard to find, made Kirito think that this dungeon was not supposed to be found this soon in the game.

It probably wasn't even supposed to be stumbled upon at all by chance alone. There was probably an NPC somewhere, or a quest, that gave some sort of information about this place, and a player was supposed to find it based on that.

It was only thanks to the fact that Kirito had literally been camping outside the doorway to this place all this time that he had eventually stumbled upon it randomly.

Kirito pulled out a torch and lit up the path in front of him.

He couldn't see the end from where he was. It went forwards a little ways and then sloped downwards and out of sight.

Taking a quick glance at his map, he was able to confirm that this was indeed a dungeon of some sort, however. His map interface had changed to reflect that.

Kirito was equal parts nervous and excited as he walked forwards.

One part of him, the part that had allowed him to survive for so long, was telling him that due to the fact that this dungeon was clearly not supposed to be found so early on in the game, the enemies inside must be staggeringly difficult for someone of his meagre strength and he should not go inside.

The other part, however, the part that was telling him to go forwards without hesitation, ultimately won out.

There was no way he could not continue forward after seeing this development.

So he started walking, sword in one hand, torch in the other.

* * *

"You are fucking up right now, Kirito," he told himself, as he continued walking down the path.

He really needed to sit down for a little while so he could collect his thoughts, but he couldn't do that when the back of his cave opened up to some sort of unknown dungeon.

Today was just not the day he wanted something like this to happen. He'd have been happy to explore tomorrow. Or yesterday. But not right now. If he could have just put this off for a day or two, or even for just a few hours, that would have been great.

The path sloped downwards for quite some time before Kirito finally found the chamber at the end.

There had been no enemies at all, so far. But the fact that he had been walking downwards for so long made him realize that he was underneath the first floor. Probably 30 or 40 meters deep.

This first room of the dungeon had almost nothing important inside it.

There were only two entrances to the room. The one Kirito had just come in through, and the one on the other side of the room leading deeper into the dungeon.

But there was one interesting thing in that room that he immediately noticed.

It was hard to miss the quest icon, after all.

Finding quests in mini dungeons wasn't unusual by any means. In fact, it'd be weirder if Kirito hadn't found one inside this place. But the weird thing about this one was that the NPC giving out the quest was clearly not alive anymore.

They were literally a skeleton. A pile of bones and rags on the floor.

' _How am I supposed to accept the quest?'_ He wondered.

He walked up to the skeleton anyway, and quickly found two items. A book of some sort, and a weird, brick looking object with weird designs on it.

The quest icon was hovering above the book.

Kirito opened it up and immediately found the expected text prompt telling him about the quest.

To sum it up, Kirito had to read the book, and then at the end, he'd be offered the choice to accept the quest or not.

Being incredibly curious about this situation, he started reading.

* * *

' _Okay,'_ Kirito concluded, closing the book.

So this weird, brick looking thing, was a camera, basically, and there was some long-winded legend about this cave only rarely opening up that Kirito didn't care about, detailed in the book.

The cave opened once a month, on a random day. That was really the only takeaway for someone that didn't care about the lore.

The part that slightly worried Kirito however, was the fact that the cave only remained open for 2 hours at a time. After which, it'd close again until the next time.

That was a _really_ small window. Small enough to explain why Kirito hadn't seen this phenomenon when it had occurred during the previous month in November. He had probably just missed it because he had been out of the cave at the time. Probably grinding, or meeting up with Timely.

But it made him realize that he really shouldn't have been able to find this place. He had just been in the right place at the right time. So the enemies were likely _very_ difficult.

Anyway, according to the book, it had been this dead NPC's life work to finally get inside this place and take a picture of the legendary 'Crystal Caves' that were apparently hidden there, with this camera.

It wasn't _really_ a camera. Not like the ones in the real world anyway. It was a fantasy camera, and functioned almost exactly like a recording crystal.

There were plenty of ways to record audio and video in SAO. Recording crystals being the primary one. They were pretty easy to come by after floor 5 or so. They were common and could even be found in NPC shops, so seeing this camera here wasn't unusual at all. In fact, it wasn't even a valuable item, really.

It'd only be valuable before the fifth floor opened up. Because with this thing, he'd be the only person able to take any pictures or videos until then. Aside from the few lucky players who managed to get recording crystals from the rare drop table, anyways.

The only weird part about the camera was that it was big and clunky. The size of a typical tablet from the real world. Only, it was a bit thicker than that, which he supposed would win it some style points and drive its worth up a little.

It didn't have a screen. Which also wasn't unexpected. Recording crystals weren't big enough to have one either. Instead, they had a crazy amount of interfaces that you had to access through the menu.

All Kirito had to do was tap on this bricky camera, and then all the relevant prompts and menus would appear before him.

So _here_ was what the quest told him to do. Kirito was supposed to pick up this camera, and complete this guy's dream for him by advancing into the dungeon, finding the Crystal Caves, and taking the picture.

Then he'd be rewarded, Kirito guessed?

He actually wasn't sure.

Who did he turn the picture in to? Who gave him the reward? The guy next to him was dead.

So this was not made clear. But it was a quest, so there had to be some sort of reward for doing it. There had never been a quest that didn't have one.

The last relevant detail in the book that Kirito had mostly skimmed through, was that the reason this guy was dead was because he had tried going into the dungeon by himself.

Turns out that was a bad idea.

But Kirito was curious now. He had never accepted a quest from a dead NPC before. What reward could there possibly be for something like this?

With nothing else to do, Kirito decided to give it a try.

If something went wrong, he had a teleport crystal. So he got up and walked further into the cave.

* * *

"Holy shit," Kirito said, as he got a look at the first enemy.

The first level 40 enemy.

' _This could be a little tricky,'_ Kirito realized.

It was a golem. A Crystal Golem, to be specific. An enemy that Kirito had never seen before. So he did not know its attack patterns.

Finding a high level enemy like this was not uncommon on this floor. Kirito actually knew about several areas with enemies even stronger than this one. The only reason why he didn't train in those areas was because it was not economical to do so.

He could kill enemies of that strength with the skills that he currently had. But it took a lot of time to whittle their health down. And at the end, even though they granted a lot of experience upon their deaths, it was simply better to kill enemies closer to his level.

In the time it took to kill 1 high levelled monster like this one at his current strength, he could have killed 10 or 20 monsters closer to his level which would have ultimately given him more experience in the end.

The only real reason to kill enemies this tough was to get the valuable loot that only they dropped. Loot that was exceedingly hard to come by with all the players as weak as they currently were. Only the best players could take down these sorts of enemies currently. Which drove the price of their drops way up.

But now it was looking like he might not have a choice but to fight them.

Unless…

Kirito slowly crept forwards with his full camouflage active.

Maybe he could sneak past them?

The fact that these high levelled golems were defending this dungeon made Kirito anticipate the reward even more. If he could just bypass all the enemies, that would be so much easier.

The enemy didn't see him as he snuck past.

Kirito grinned.

* * *

That grin was wiped clean off his face as he continued into the dungeon.

There were dozens of golems around him now. All randomly walking around.

' _Why do I keep putting myself in these situations?'_ he wondered.

If he got spotted now, Kirito would instantly teleport, because there was no way he'd be able to fight all of these things at once.

His eyes widened even further when a level 60 enemy appeared. A Giant Crystal Golem walked past him. Followed by 9 others immediately after, all forming a line.

He heard his Hide Rate alarm go off, indicating that it was getting dangerously low.

Kirito immediately started walking back the way he came, heart frantically beating all the while.

There were way too many enemies to just walk through. He was going to need to be _extremely_ careful.

Kirito heard a screeching sound a moment later.

Looking at the source, he stared straight into the eyes of a bat.

A Crystal Bat.

Only level 30. But the fact that it was staring straight at him, despite the fact that he was invisible, worried him immensely.

He reached up and prepared to grab his sheathed sword.

But then he stopped himself.

He didn't need it.

Instead, he grabbed a teleport crystal. He looked down at it for a while, and then finally summoned the courage to proceed.

* * *

After carefully figuring out all the movements of the enemies, Kirito managed to work his way deeper and deeper into the dungeon. He had had to get creative. Sticking to shadows, climbing across the walls and even the ceiling on one occasion, waiting for enemies to walk past him, but he never drew his sword.

It was difficult, but his overpowered Hiding skill and a little ingenuity allowed him to make it through without any incidents.

It helped immensely that it was a mini dungeon. If this had been a labyrinth, this would not have been possible. Mini dungeons were designed to be clearable by only a small group of appropriately levelled players in only a day or so. So they did not have millions of enemies to get through.

Which meant that it was possible for a person with maxed out Hiding to sneak all the way through.

At least for a mini dungeon with these types of enemies. The golems were easy to sneak past, relatively speaking, since their senses weren't very accurate. It was the bats that were hard. They were the first enemies that Kirito had ever come up against that seemed to be designed to counteract players trying to hide from enemies by directly attacking their Hide Rate.

Nepenthes found hidden players by smelling them. So they sort of did something similar. But these bats used an actual Searching ability. One that actually did damage to his camouflage. It just wasn't strong enough to break it.

In higher levelled dungeons than this one, Kirito knew that there would be even more countermeasures of this nature set up.

* * *

It was very obvious when Kirito reached the place he was looking for. The cave opened up revealing a massive cavern full of gigantic purple crystals shooting off in every direction.

It was an unbelievable sight.

He knew, in that moment, exactly why that NPC had wanted to take a picture of this.

It was beautiful.

But… still worried about the enemies walking all around him, Kirito wanted to finish up this quest and get out before something else happened.

The room with these gigantic crystals probably contained a boss of some sort. One that Kirito would be nowhere near strong enough to defeat.

So he'd just get the picture, and see what the reward was for the quest. Maybe he'd come back one day to continue exploring. When he was stronger. Because it looked like this cave went on for a long time yet. Kirito had been nowhere near done exploring all the hallways.

Kirito pulled out the camera, took the picture, and then he made his way back to the entrance of the dungeon after seeing the 'Quest Complete' prompt.

* * *

Kirito let out a sigh of relief upon entering the room with the dead NPC once again.

Now that he was in a safe-ish area again, he could actually see what the quest reward was.

Opening up his menu, Kirito took a look.

He had levelled up to 19. So he had gotten a huge chunk of experience, having levelled up twice. Since the quest was so high levelled in comparison to him, the experience drop he had just received had probably been meant for a player somewhere around level 50. So it was supposed to be a moderate amount for someone of that strength. But since Kirito was much lower levelled than that, this moderate amount of experience was actually pretty significant.

He also thought it was pretty funny that the quest he had just finished was supposed to involve a lot of actual combat. But Kirito had basically weaseled out of it all with his Hiding skill. Yet he still got the combat experience for it anyways.

Going through his notification history, Kirito quickly pulled up the minimized Quest Complete prompt once again, as it listed everything he had received at the end of the quest, and he had not had the opportunity to look at it in detail before now. He had needed to focus on hiding from all the enemies.

' _What the hell?'_

He had gotten 2 things, according to the prompt. A chunk of experience… and a new skill.

Photography.

' _What the hell kind of skill is that?'_ he wondered.

It sounded utterly useless. Recording Crystals were already a thing.

So… what? He got to keep this fancy camera? That was the extent of the quest rewards? How did he level up this skill? By taking pictures? The only useful part of the quest had been the experience.

Kirito's stomach dropped after realizing something a moment later, however.

He was level 19. He only had 4 skill slots. All of which were already occupied. How had he just received a new skill?

The system hadn't just given him the option to take up the skill in the future. It had literally equipped the skill to his character.

Had… had the system just overwritten all the progress he had made in one of his previous skills just to give him this useless one?

Kirito frantically opened his menu and navigated to his skills page to check.

What he saw confused him, to say the least.

He had 5 active skills.

How the hell did he have 5 skills? He only had 4 slots.

He had an extra skill slot.

Where the hell had it come from?

* * *

He spent the next several minutes doing extensive experimentation.

He removed his new Photography skill, which erased his marginal progress in it, and relocated it to the list of skills he could choose from upon unlocking a new skill slot. So it sat among all the others such as Crafting, Blacksmithing, and Woodcutting.

Photography had not been in that list by default. So even though it existed in his list of chooseable skills now, it would not exist in other players' lists. It was a unique skill. He even confirmed this fact by looking at the skill description of it.

Photography could only be equipped by the person in possession of the camera. So if he ever lost it or traded it away, someone else could pick the skill up. But unless he did that, only he could use it.

But when he removed the skill from his character, he still had the empty skill slot it had originally occupied.

There was no doubt. He had 5 skill slots now.

Why?

If the skill slot had been given to him as a quest reward, then it would be the single most valuable quest reward he had ever received. But it would have been listed in the rewards screen. The system wouldn't just give a player that as an award and not tell them about it.

He was so confused.

He was not supposed to unlock another skill slot until level 20. So that couldn't be the reason either. He was level 19.

Did the system give them away as rare drops? Was it some sort of bug? If he decided to put a skill in that slot, would the system one day figure out that he had an extra slot and remove it, destroying whatever skill he had placed there?

Kirito simply had no explanation.

Deciding that if he was going to lose a skill, it'd be best to lose the most useless one, he equipped Photography once again into the extra slot.

He did not want to equip something like Blacksmithing, throw a ton of money into levelling it up, only to lose it later on.

Kirito teleported out of the dungeon with his ring a few minutes later. The door to the dungeon had closed, trapping him inside. So it was the only way to leave without using a crystal. There was probably some alternate exit buried somewhere in the dungeon to prevent players from being locked inside, but he hadn't managed to find it during his short stint inside.

He had, for a few moments, considered the idea of just staying inside the dungeon. But he eventually decided that it wouldn't help him to do so.

He had not managed to find any safe zones in the dungeon to place his tent in. That would have been ideal. As it would have been so much safer than sleeping back in his cave. There would have been basically a zero percent chance of ever meeting another player inside the place since the dungeon only opened up once a month.

But he hadn't found a good spot. And it was too dangerous to risk sleeping with all of these golems around, so he had thrown this idea out.

And besides, if he had decided to stay inside the dungeon, he would have had to give up on his deal with Agil and Timely.

So he left instead. But he did decide that he wanted to come back one day. It would be difficult, and he had no idea how he was going to ensure that he was in his cave when the wall started to glow again, but he just couldn't stay inside at his current strength.

Leaving also had the added advantage of letting him sit down somewhere familiar. A place that he knew was actually safe so he could freak the hell out for a little while in peace, now that the quest was over.

It had been a nice little distraction. But now that it was over, his battle with Illfang returned to the forefront of his mind with a vengeance.

So Kirito returned to his cave as if nothing had ever happened. As if there wasn't a hidden mini dungeon entrance at the end of it that only opened up once a month randomly. Then he sat down and finally tried to deal with the deluge of anxiety that his brain had kindly been generating for him for the past few hours.

Because how the hell was he still alive?

* * *

After an hour or so of being in a state of controlled panic, he eventually decided that it would be more constructive to try and get his mind occupied with something else instead.

So Kirito randomly fiddled around with his new camera, doing random experiments.

He figured a few things out during this time.

Not all pictures and videos were created equal, for one. The system had some way of determining how interesting a photo was. And it rewarded a ton of experience for capturing really interesting ones. Whereas a picture of a black wall granted you basically nothing.

He had no idea how the system figured out what was interesting and what wasn't, but Kirito didn't really care, because the skill was such a joke anyway.

As he leveled the skill up, he would unlock more features on the camera. At the beginning, at level 1, he could take basic pictures and videos with it. But later on, he'd be able to take slow motion videos, and 3d videos. And he'd be able to set the camera up to take videos or photos after a time delay. Allowing him to put the thing down for a few seconds, before walking into frame and posing for a shot.

In other words, it had no practical use whatsoever to someone like him. It was a waste of a slot. But he wanted to leave it there for a few days anyway, just to see if this really was some sort of system bug that would be corrected.

He was level 3 in the skill now, after his experiments, and he had just unlocked the ability to make simple 3d videos.

Deciding to give it a try, Kirito hit the record button and put the camera on the ground. Then he walked a distance away and performed a sword skill in full view of the camera.

After finishing, he picked up the camera again, and took a look at the video he had just captured.

Everything in the surrounding environment had been recorded in this 3d video, but Kirito's screen to view it was a 2d window. So he could not see all of it at once and had to scroll side to side to finally find the image of him doing the skill.

Kirito saw himself in this newly captured video appear out of thin air suddenly, as his camouflage had deactivated upon activation of the sword skill. Then the video version of him disappeared again as the skill completed and his camouflage had activated once more. Then, a few moments later, the camera view suddenly shifted around as his invisible being picked it up while it was still recording and then finally turned it off.

Kirito frowned.

Maybe… just maybe… this was a bit more useful than he had originally expected.

That sword skill he had seen himself perform on screen… was sloppy. His balance had been slightly off center, his arm should have been pulled in a little more, and he could see a dozen other tiny things that he could do to improve the swing and make it more efficient.

If he could…

Kirito's eyes widened in astonishment.

If he had access to a slow motion camera, he could solve his problem. Skill connecting. The outside system skill that allowed you to negate a sword's cooldown by activating a skill with a different sword in the other hand at a precise instant.

With the ability to view himself in slow motion, he could pin down exactly where all of his mistakes were, and finally nail this concept down. He could perfect it. He could also improve his spins, and all of his other sword skills, making him a far better fighter than he currently was.

But he winced a moment later, remembering his recent bout with Illfang.

Why was it that he had decided to attempt to solo that boss in the first place? Kirito asked himself. His mind immediately provided for him the exact sequence of logical steps that had convinced him that it was a good idea, originally.

He wanted to get out of the game alive.

Because he was orange, there was a chance that every single player in the game would one day attempt to hunt him down.

...Which meant he had to get strong enough to fight them all off.

To do that he had to become the strongest.

To do that he needed to be the highest leveled player.

To do that he needed more experience than anyone else.

To do that he needed to take big risks like taking down floor bosses on his own to get that experience.

It was a logical sequence of inevitable steps stemming from the single fact that he couldn't be sure that the other players would leave him alone. One day, someone would probably find him. And they would try to kill him for being a criminal.

He had to be ready for that day.

But Illfang had just... _flattened_ him. Or _something_ had, anyway.

And that had fundamentally shaken his confidence in his abilities. The fact that his skill level had played almost no part at all in the fact that he was still alive, and that it had been entirely due to chance, had just crushed something inside him.

What was he even doing making all of these preparations if all of them could just be thrown aside in an instant like that?

He wasn't strong enough to do the job.

He glanced down at the camera in his hands.

Then he got an idea.

Maybe it wasn't because he wasn't strong enough that he had failed against Illfang. Maybe it was just because of the fact that he didn't have proper information on this new version of the floor boss.

Illfang had a ranged attack now.

' _I think…'_

' _I think I need to see it firsthand.'_

The attack that had struck him down when his back had been turned.

He took a deep breath and held it for a little while. Then he released it.

He needed to stand up and try it again. He would never be able to get over this if he didn't. Kirito didn't want to end up like those jaded war-veterans with PTSD, deep depression, and all sorts of other mental conditions.

Maybe he could sort of head all of that off before it happened by just continuing forward and pretending it didn't happen. Sort of like what he did when he killed that Crasher. And when he almost died by getting impaled and surrounded by those nepenthes.

He just… didn't think about those things anymore. Except during his sleep of course. Then he had some pretty freaky and vivid nightmares about them. Oh, also whenever he was still awake but just trying to go to sleep. It all came back pretty clearly then too. And sometimes during his walks to and from his cave. But other than that, he more or less didn't think about those things anymore.

He needed to get there with this new thing, too. _The Swat_ , or whatever the hell it had been. He needed to continue as if it didn't happen or else it would drag him down and ruin his life.

So he needed to face down Illfang again, and win. Or at the very least he needed to understand the thing that had nearly killed him. His new camera could help him do that.

The other players… they were having a boss meeting at noon.

Kirito looked at his clock. It was 6 a.m now. So the meeting was in 6 hours.

He made a decision in that moment. He'd watch their fight. He wouldn't participate in it. He didn't think he was ready for that just yet. He'd just follow the party of players, and using his new camera, he'd video tape their entire battle.

If they lost, Kirito would go over the footage of the fight and analyze it as best as he could.

Then maybe…

Maybe he'd make a second attempt once he figured out how that ranged attack worked.

If the players won, on the other hand, then Kirito would just have to come up with a new plan entirely.

Perhaps he'd try to solo the second floor boss in that case.

* * *

He left for Tolbana immediately. He wanted to attend this meeting in secret to see what everyone was going to say there. But to do this, he needed to scout out a position where he could hide.

It took some time. But Kirito had a lot of experience hiding from people, so he managed to find a good spot relatively quickly.

Since it was early in the morning, nobody was at the meeting yet. So nobody noticed Kirito climbing up to the top of a building. Nobody noticed him sitting down behind a ledge on the top of it.

When the meeting finally started, all Kirito would have to do is peek over the ledge to see what was going on. He was close enough to hear anything that was said.

All he had to do now was wait.

He had four hours to go, yet.

* * *

Kirito was fiddling around with his camera again.

He had learned a few new interesting details about it.

His pictures and videos were saved to the camera itself. Not to his character. So if he gave up his camera, or sold it to someone, all of those videos and pictures could be seen by that person after the transfer.

He knew that this was the case because he could still view the picture he had taken when he had completed that quest. The picture of the Crystal Caves.

He had removed the Photography skill back then when he had been investigating his weird, new skill slot. This had erased his progress in the skill, but had not deleted the picture.

So everything he recorded could basically serve as a permanent record of events. Well unless he manually deleted it, anyways.

It made him wonder about his role in this death game.

What would happen to all of this footage when SAO was finally cleared? Would it ever be viewed by someone in the outside world? Did that make him some sort of SAO historian? Would people treat this footage the same way archaeologists treated ancient texts?

Probably not. But it sure made him think.

He was in a unique situation now, where he could create records of the events that went on in the world.

And it made him decide that maybe he should take that role at least a little seriously.

He wouldn't just watch this boss meeting. He'd film it, he decided. Maybe someone in the future who was investigating these events would thank him for doing so.

* * *

' _This is actually really useful,'_ Kirito realized.

He was still seated behind the ledge on the roof. But he had taken a few practice videos of the surrounding area to prepare for when the meeting started. And he had learned something else that was actually surprisingly useful during this time.

He had levelled the skill up a couple of times and had unlocked a subtle, new ability.

He could now record a video and watch that video simultaneously.

He had placed the camera down on the ledge to record a video of the area. But he found out that he could also use the menu to watch the camera feed as it was recording. This meant that it functioned basically as a security camera. Kirito did not have to look over the ledge to watch the meeting. He could just put the camera down in a spot overlooking the area, and watch the feed from his menu. All while he was tucked away, safely out of sight.

There was a restriction to this ability, though, related to distance. To do this, the camera had to basically be within arms reach of him. So he couldn't put it down on the ground and leave the area while still watching this live feed like this.

He could leave the camera recording and come back to get it after, and see the footage that way, but he could not watch the video live from a distance. Yet. The skill description hinted that this was possible to do when he progressed further in the skill, but he wasn't that highly levelled.

But having access to an actual security camera like that…

Kirito could already think of a ton of applications for that. Recording crystals did not have that functionality.

The next thing he discovered was a pretty obvious detail in hindsight. If he took an interesting picture, acquiring a huge amount of experience, he would not get more experience by taking the same picture again.

That would have been unfair.

But his respect for this skill was definitely increasing. He had been a little too quick to judge it.

This respect raised even further when he stumbled upon a new minor Hiding ability that complemented it.

He could now expand his camouflage so that it affected small items that he placed nearby. It'd make his camouflage weaker since it was covering a wider area, but he could make small objects invisible as long as they were within arms reach of him, and as long as he had his camouflage active.

It was a really minor ability. But it was useful in this situation since it allowed him to make his camera invisible even when he wasn't holding it. As long as it was near him, anyways.

He had unlocked this new Hiding ability when he had placed the camera down on the ledge. That had filled some sort of hidden requirement in the system to unlock it.

Nobody would be able to see his camera now. Not without breaking Kirito's camouflage anyway. It would have been nearly impossible to spot even without this ability due to the fact that it was so small. It would also be on top of a building, while the other players in the area would be on the ground, making it much harder to see. This added security gave Kirito an extra sense of relief.

Given everything that had happened over the last few hours, this was much appreciated.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Slimicee, Myrek, Salvia Officinalis, Gabriella Gadfly**


	17. Fruit Juice

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Diabel, despite having known he would be speaking in front of everyone today, couldn't stop himself from feeling nervous. It was the first time that all the best players had gathered together like this. It was a historic moment where the entire future of the game might be decided.

But _he_ was the guy who had been picked to speak. He didn't like giving speeches, but apparently, he had given enough of them over the past few weeks that were good enough for him to be nominated and shoe-horned into the position he currently found himself in.

He took a look at the audience in front of him. There weren't too many people there, only about 40 or so. But there were a few dozen cloaked players hanging out in the back, listening in from a distance, as well. Anonymous players that didn't like being in crowded places but who had still found this moment important enough to spectate.

Those anons were on the fence about this. If the meeting turned out alright, then many of them would join in the upcoming fight. But if it failed, they would quietly leave without anyone really realizing that they had been there in the first place. So the full crowd that Diabel would be speaking to was probably at least twice as big as it looked at first glance.

He took a deep breath to calm his nerves, and then finally began his rehearsed speech. He covered all the main points. He introduced himself, thanked everyone for coming, tried throwing in a quick joke to try and ease the tension, and then finally explained how his party had found the boss room. He explained how they needed to beat the boss to make it to the next floor, and how it was their duty as the best players in the game to demonstrate to everyone else that it was possible to beat the game.

"Do you agree?" He asked. "Or not?"

When everyone cheered and agreed wholeheartedly, almost all the remaining nervousness he had in him vanished. It definitely could have gone worse.

Diabel immediately continued. He started explaining to everyone that they needed to form into parties and started to delve into some of the basic strategy behind the upcoming fight.

That was when things started to go south.

"Hold up a sec!"

Diabel pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration at seeing who it was. He had a rough idea of what was about to happen next. Kibaou had been making all sorts of waves and spreading rumours about the beta testers. Diabel had hoped that this player wouldn't voice such hate here, since it could drive a wedge between all the players, but that was apparently too much to ask.

* * *

Thankfully, however, the infamous Agil had his back. Unfortunately, however, the sight of the merchant threw the entire meeting off-course. Almost every single player there sported an Anneal Blade. Diabel actually had two of them. Both of them were maxed out in their upgrades as well and had cost him almost every last cor that he had.

The problem now was, even though most of the players hadn't purchased their ovules from Agil himself, everybody knew that he was getting his supply from that mysterious merchant. And as a result, almost everybody had suspicions that the man knew who that player was, and how they were getting so many of them. So when Agil showed up to the meeting and spoke, everything almost instantly derailed into a bunch of accusations and discussions about the mysterious, shadow-deal between Agil and that other merchant.

Why couldn't everyone just listen quietly until Diabel was finished? They were just wasting time now.

* * *

"Shut up!" Diabel shouted, finally fed up with the constant interruptions, silencing the crowd. "Nobody cares about the stupid ovules right now! We all have our weapons, we all have our items, so we all have everything we need to take down this boss! If you want to start throwing each other under the bus then let's get to the next floor first!"

"The same goes with the beta testers! Now is not the time to drive a wedge between us! Nothing will ever get done if we start a pointless witch hunt! We can talk about the beta testers and who the mysterious merchant that allowed us all to get our Anneal Blades is, _after_ Illfang is dead. We can even have another meeting about that if you want. But this meeting here, is not that one. This meeting is to inform you all that we, me and my party, are going to take down the boss tomorrow no matter who decides to come with us! I am giving you all the option to participate! So either sit down and shut up, or get the hell out! Understand?!"

There were no further complaints from the crowd. Diabel took this as a sign to continue.

"Good. Now listen carefully..."

He was able to finish the rest of the strategy briefing without any further interruptions.

* * *

There was good news and bad news from Kirito's point of view.

The good news was that the raid group wasn't setting out immediately. They weren't leaving until 10 o'clock the following morning. The bad news was that Diabel had not clearly emphasized how different the beta test was from the actual game. The gathered players would not be prepared for the differences if they stuck to that strategy guide too closely. There was definitely nothing at all listed about Illfang's unknown ranged attack.

Diabel had also left out the fact that beta testers currently had the highest casualty rate amongst all types of players due to being caught unprepared for these differences. The meeting may have gone over better if he had mentioned that.

But what did he know? Kirito was hiding on a rooftop. And there's no way he would have been able to summon the courage to speak in front of everyone like that, even if he had been green. And chastising the crowd like that to get the meeting back on track… it was something else. It looked like the raid group would be in good hands with someone like that at the helm. Someone who actually seemed like a leader.

Kirito took a look at the player called Kibaou, next, and started thinking.

 _That_ player could cause massive problems in the future. If he succeeded in villainizing the beta testers, the players' progress through the game would be slowed down immensely due to all the infighting.

That was a problem. Kirito depended on the players ultimately winning in the end to get out. The only reason why he was trying so hard to be the strongest among them all was to keep himself safe until then. He needed everyone to cooperate with each other. This sort of rhetoric about beta testers being the bad guys... that could get people killed. Even if there were a few grains of truth to it.

Kibaou might just get himself killed, by a beta tester no less, if he kept making waves like that.

Kirito's thoughts were cut off when he noticed a familiar face in the crowd of players. He had spotted her as soon as she had stood up to leave. The girl had been sitting in the back of the crowd of players and had just stood up after forming her party.

He didn't expect that girl to be here. Only yesterday she had been a wreck. But now here she was, preparing to take on the boss with all these other players.

Kirito grinned. It'd be an interesting battle.

But before it happened, Kirito had to decide what he wanted to do now. The meeting was wrapping up, and he had no reason to be there any longer. But the players weren't planning to fight the boss until tomorrow. So what should he do until then?

Reaching up to his hidden camera, he finally turned the video feed off and prepared to leave.

He had levelled up in the skill again. Taking such a long video of so many players having a meeting had apparently been 'interesting' enough to give the requisite experience. Unfortunately, Kirito would not be able to just keep the camera on indefinitely, however. It wouldn't be considered 'interesting' if he did, and so he would be granted a vanishingly small amount of xp the longer a recording like that went on.

But Kirito had been on the internet a lot in his life, and he had an idea now on how he could level the skill up a little faster while having the added advantage of organizing some of his thoughts. If he died at some point, it'd also serve as a record that he was there.

* * *

The boom of the boss room door closing echoed throughout the silent room.

"I came here yesterday on my own," Kirito whispered to the currently recording video camera in his hand. "I've been preparing to solo this boss for a long time now. Unfortunately, my first attempt didn't go so well. I didn't have this camera at the time, though, so I couldn't record the attempt."

Kirito rested his back against the giant stone door he had just come through, and continued to narrate his thoughts to the camera. Once again, he was alone inside the boss room.

"Anyway, Illfang did something back then and it almost killed me. I wish I could have recorded it. I have no idea what it was, but it left me with only 3 HP left after. Launched me clean across this room. It should have killed me. It was really only due to luck that I was able to pull a crystal out in time."

"I never really thought about it before, but today I learned that teleport crystals actually have two effects. They transport a player from one location to another, but they also halt any leftover kinetic energy that the player may have had when they do. _That_ effect is what saved my life."

"So I'm here again. Reluctantly. In fact, you can see Illfang right over there, asleep." As he said this, Kirito tilted the camera in the direction he indicated. It was incredibly dark, but there was enough light to see what was going on.

"That's kinda why I'm whispering. If I make too much noise, my camouflage will break, and I'll be spotted. It turns out, boss rooms don't actually automatically activate upon players entering them. The boss has to actually find you first before they wake up and attack. Or at least Illfang is like that. So if you happen to be really good at hiding, you can sneak around the deactivated boss room and mess around with the items inside. I'm making this video mostly as proof to demonstrate that."

"Last time I was here, I was able to steal Illfang's weapons, but nobody would ever believe me if I just said that, so I'm here to gather irrefutable proof that it's possible. I stole his axe, his shield, and his nodachi earlier and I plan to do it again. He doesn't have a talwar like he did back in the beta, so I am here to confirm that the rumours of there being differences between this version and the beta are true as well."

"Anyway, when I succeeded in stealing them, I had the random thought to see if I could actually remove them from the room entirely. I had locked myself in though, back then, so I wasn't able to test it out. Since I had been prepared for a long battle and didn't want to get crashed by anyone, I had decided to activate the boss room locking switch."

"I suppose I could have used a crystal to leave with them, but then I would have been warped to the other side of the map, which would have ruined my plan to solo the boss. I'd have had to walk all the way back here, which wasn't an option since I was on such a tight schedule."

"But I failed in that attempt anyway. I did not forget about that idea, though. I am going to test it out while I'm here. I'm not here to actually make an attempt to defeat Illfang. I'm just not ready for that. Not without understanding what nearly killed me last time. I'll probably fight him a little, but I plan to retreat. I'm here for information, just in case the other players succeed in their own attempts to defeat this boss tomorrow. If he dies now, I'll never know the answers to these questions."

"I'm going to go take his weapons now. You'll have to forgive me for not narrating the process as I do, but I'll leave the feed on so you can watch. I'm going to stop talking for a while though, so… yeah. Enjoy the video I guess."

* * *

"It was much harder the first time," Kirito whispered, after gently placing the final, stolen item onto the ground next to the boss room door. "I was overly cautious back then, but I've sort of gotten used to doing this now. So I've got Illfang's shield, his axe and his nodachi. Last time, I climbed up one of these pillars and dropped down on the boss from the sky with the nodachi. I had this whole plan in place to deal as much damage as possible."

"It didn't work."

"Anyway, if you can bear with me for a few moments, now that I have this camera, there are a few more experiments that I need to quickly run. I'll be back in a sec."

Kirito shut off the video feed.

* * *

"Okay so I just checked," Kirito whispered on the next segment of the video, "and it turns out that when I'm invisible like this, these giant weapons can't actually be seen on the camera when I'm carrying them. I took a video of myself carrying them around while invisible, but nothing showed up. I can only assume that that means they can't be seen by other players either. I guess anything that I'm carrying with me falls under my camouflage, even if it's a huge axe I can barely lift."

"You know, now that I'm thinking about it, these videos probably look pretty weird to you. When I point the camera at my face like I've been doing all this time while I'm talking, you can't actually see me because I'm invisible. So to you guys, it looks like I'm pointing the camera in weird directions for no reason while my disembodied voice continues narrating. I'll try and be more mindful of that from now on."

"Anyway, because everything I'm carrying is invisible as well, this means that other people won't see this giant axe right here floating through the air suspiciously. It's actually invisible as well and will remain so until my camoflauge drops or I let go of it."

"But it does make it harder. My camouflage is basically like a bubble. I can expand the bubble as big as I want, but it becomes more unstable and easier to break as I do. So I have to be careful about that."

"I needed the results of that last experiment so that I can safely conduct this next one. I'm going to teleport back to the Town of Beginnings now with some of these items, and I'd rather not be seen when I do." It was a bit risky doing that, and it'd be suicidal if he tried to do that with something as heavy as the axe, but the shield wasn't nearly as heavy. He could take it back with him to the center of the town and escape before being spotted, he was nearly certain of that. Kirito had gotten some practice getting out of sight from that teleport gate.

"This experiment serves two purposes as far as I can tell. It'll show whether or not I can teleport with an item that belongs to a boss and keep it, and it'll also allow me to see what happens to it when I come back here. If I stash everything I steal somewhere outside this labyrinth, then what happens when I come back here? Will Illfang have new items to replace the ones he lost? If he does, can I steal everything again to get more?"

"Is this an item duplication glitch?"

"It's time to find out, I guess."

* * *

"Okay, I'm back. Again. It's been over four hours since my last video. I spent most of that time walking all the way back here. Though I did have to re-steal all of the weapons, again. The boss room resets every time all players leave, so this makes three times that I've stolen all three weapons now.

"Anyway, while I did succeed in bringing the weapons outside the boss room earlier, it turns out that they can't be teleported. My teleport crystal worked, but it did not bring the shield back with me even though I was holding it at the time. I guess the weapon just doesn't belong to me. I can't put any of them in my inventory, either.

"But I've been thinking. What if I just walk them all the way back outside the dungeon on foot? It'll take a long time, but it'll test the same thing as teleporting with them. I already confirmed that I can take them outside the room, but how far can I actually travel with them? Can I walk all the way out of the labyrinth?

"I'm going to leave this video running while I do, because no matter what happens, it'll be worth recording. I might run into an invisible wall or something. Some system command demanding that I cease attempting these experiments. Wouldn't that be something? Or I might actually succeed. It's interesting either way.

"The problem is I can't carry all three of these things at once. It's too risky with all the hazards in the dungeon that I might run into. Too much weight. So I'm just going to try taking two, for now.

"I basically have two options. Because of how massively heavy the axe is, I can either take just the axe, or I can take both the shield and the nodachi. Since I'm not a two handed weapon user, I figured that the axe wouldn't be as helpful so I'm not going to take it. This nodachi is also beginning to grow on me a little bit. It's heavy in its own right, but it isn't nearly as bad as the axe.

"So I'm taking those two with me. The shield and the nodachi. Let's see what happens."

* * *

Kirito finally stepped outside into the daylight, video still recording. Just before he was about to speak again, however, a notification screen suddenly appeared on his menu. His eyebrows rose up into his hairline as he finished reading the prompt.

He spent a long time staring in total disbelief at the message before finally doing something.

"Um… I don't know if the camera can actually see my menu or not," Kirito spoke in disbelief, aiming the camera at his menu, "but uh… yeah. I just got a text prompt."

"Apparently, I just completed something called a Hidden Quest." Kirito had so many questions now. He had never heard of one of those before. Nothing about them had been mentioned in the guidebook, and nobody in the beta had heard about them either.

"The quest is called: Stolen Weapons." It was pretty obvious what it entailed. "And it was unlisted. There were no people to talk to or places to go to actually start it. You just had to figure it out, I guess. So I accidentally stumbled myself into completing it."

"Like most quests, this one has a reward." Kirito gulped, and stared at the rewards screen, trying to confirm that his eyes were actually telling him the truth. "The weapons themselves. They are considered mine now. On my menu right now, I can see their stats, and my name is listed as the owner."

"The quest isn't fully complete yet. It's got a big 2 / 3 listed next to the name of the quest. But I think it's pretty obvious what that means." Kirito turned around and looked back at the entrance of the labyrinth.

"I know what we're doing next."

* * *

"The weapons are actually gone now," Kirito whispered in disbelief as he re-entered the boss room. "Illfang doesn't have them anymore." The boss room had not reset back to its original configuration this time. Everything else was in place exactly as it should have been, but Illfang did not have the two main weapons that Kirito had stolen. Illfang only had the axe that Kirito had left behind.

"They actually belong to me now. All of them except the axe anyway. But that'll be mine too in a little while. I just need to steal it again." Kirito paused for another few moments and contemplated this new plan, before finally looking into the camera.

"Well, I guess I'll see you guys again when I'm outside with the axe." All he had to do was walk it out of the labyrinth, just like with the others. Then it'd be his.

* * *

"What the hell am I going to do with these things?" Kirito asked rhetorically, to whatever unknown future audience that may or may not ever watch this footage. He now had all three weapons in his possession. "Their stats are unbelievable. Weapons like these shouldn't even exist on this floor. Will a Blacksmith even be able to repair them if they get damaged?" This was completely new territory. He had never even imagined that something like this could be possible. So many new doors were now open to him.

But what about the raid party? What would they do when they found Illfang unarmed tomorrow? That could pose some problems. Since Illfang was unarmed now, what would the other players do when they walked into the boss room? They would immediately notice this. Would they think that maybe Kayaba had been kind enough to make the first floor boss easier than expected to raise their hopes? Or would they think something else was going on?

What about Argo? What would she do with that information? She was completely dangerous and unpredictable. Would she figure out anything that Kirito didn't want her to?

He needed a plan.

"I think I'm going to need to do a few more tests," he said. "There's a few things I need to do over the next couple of hours." He had figured out a lot of things, but he still had so many questions.

"What will happen if I give these new weapons back to Illfang? Will he pick them up again? Will he reclaim them as his?"

He needed more answers.

"I can't wait anymore. I have to test it out. The only way to do that is by waking him up and fighting him though. I have no intention of defeating him, but I need to see what happens."

Kirito started the trek back to the boss room once again.

* * *

"Just so we're clear," Kirito whispered to the camera, as he continued setting up everything for his next plan, "this is almost exactly what I did the last time I fought him. The only difference is that I can actually store these giant weapons in my inventory and I don't have to struggle my way up these pillars with any of them tied to my back." He was standing on top of the pillars now, just as he had been during the beginning of his previous attempt on Illfang's life.

"I am going to perform the exact same opening, exactly as I did last time. I need to know if these weapons do the same amount of damage when they belong to me." He had used the weapons last time, but the system had considered them as belonging to Illfang at the time. It was possible that that had restricted his damage output with them, somewhat. This test was to figure out if that was actually how it worked.

"So I'll compare where Illfang's health bar is after I'm done attacking this time, to where it had been at the end of my assault last time. In order to do that, everything needs to happen the same way."

Kirito continued walking along the concrete beam spanning across the top of the pillars. He was on the right side of the room, just like last time. After a few moments, he found what he was looking for.

"I'm going to leave this camera right up here so that it can see everything," he whispered as he wedged the camera inside a divot at the top of one of the pillars. From the new location, it could see a bird's eye view of the entire room.

"I don't have anything convenient to carry this camera with, so I can't shoot anything in first person. If I had some sort of strap or something, that would have been ideal. Or maybe a belt of some sort." He'd have to talk to Timely about that. Or Agil. Maybe someone with a Crafting or Tailoring skill could make him something to allow him to create videos akin to the ones made from a Go-Pro, or a body-cam.

"After getting this new information on the boss's health and the strength of these weapons, I intend to drop them on the ground to see what Illfang does with them. Will he pick them up and try to use them even though they technically belong to me now?"

"Anyway, I'm off. Here goes nothing." Kirito drank a full set of his potions and repeated the exact same maneuver as he did last time.

* * *

Five, sword skill aided spins on top of the pillars, followed by switching out his weapons for the nodachi in a precise combination of gestures, kicked everything off. Then Kirito came down on top of Illfang almost identically to how he had before.

The nodachi dug so deep into the boss that it ended up stuck, impaled in Illfang's gut.

The boss room activated and lit up, Illfang awoke, and Kirito planted his swords into the boss's eyes once again. He flipped Illfang off the throne and onto his back, and pulled out his new axe, this time from his inventory, and went into the helicopter technique.

The same, exact sequence of events played out with almost no deviations. About 30 hits in total before Illfang finally collected himself and leaped away. Illfang got up, and Kirito bowled him over again by tossing the axe at him.

Then the minions spawned.

This time, however, Kirito wasn't going to approach Illfang at all. And he certainly wasn't going to look away from him. His goal was to simply avoid the boss as best as he could, keep the minions at bay, and watch what Illfang did like a hawk.

Kirito observed Illfang's health bar. Doing so, he learned that it didn't matter who owned the weapons. They did the same amount of damage as last time. Illfang had only lost about 3% of his total HP. This led him to believe that this concept probably applied to players as well. If Kirito ever disarmed a player, and stabbed them with their own weapon before they could summon it back to their hands, he could probably inflict some decent damage that way.

He spent the next minute or so keeping his distance from Illfang, and battling the minions. 'Battling' was perhaps not the appropriate word, however. He was mostly just running from them, waiting for Illfang's blindness debuff to run out to see what the boss would do next.

When it finally ran out, Illfang pulled out the swords from his eyes, and tossed them to the side, marking the first significant variation between this and the previous fight. Kirito was too far away to be in range of a thrown Anneal Blade, so Illfang had tossed them aside instead. Kirito summoned them back to his hands anyway, and quickly put them away.

Illfang pulled out the impaled nodachi from his stomach next and sheathed it, then he walked over to pick up the axe from the floor.

This was what Kirito wanted to see. Illfang was trying to reclaim his weapons. Would he succeed in doing so? Kirito was eagerly anticipating the results of this test.

But a single paranoid thought crossed his mind at that moment. What if Kirito actually lost the weapons permanently? Just in case, he quickly summoned the nodachi that Illfang had just sheathed, into his hands, and immediately threw it into his inventory. Since the weapon was currently considered his by the system, there was no reason why he would be unable to summon it to him just like any other weapon. So he did so, not wanting to risk losing something so valuable. He didn't really care about the axe, though. Illfang could have that one if he wanted.

Now, even in the worst case scenario, Kirito would come out of this confrontation with at least two items. The shield, and the nodachi were both in his inventory.

But then something unexpected happened. Illfang just… stopped. After picking up the axe, the boss made no further attempt to close the distance. Instead, it elected to simply observe Kirito, just as he was observing Illfang.

They were watching each other.

Another strange event occurred next. One of the six minions that Kirito had been keeping at bay disengaged and made its way over towards the boss. Kirito watched the kobold casually saunter across the room to Illfang and stand right next to him.

Then both Kobolds simply… stared at him.

At first, Kirito didn't really pay it much mind. It had been slightly disconcerting at first, but he hadn't really had the time to figure out just how weird it was, since he was busy keeping the other five minions occupied. But when the seconds continued to tick on and turn into minutes, Kirito started to feel uneasy. The two kobolds on the other side of the room stood perfectly still like statues. Illfang wasn't growling. He wasn't roaring, or acting aggressive, he was just standing perfectly still, watching Kirito's every move. They were about 30 meters away.

Frankly, it was terrifying. Kirito did not like it one bit when the monsters he was fighting started to behave erratically. Especially when they were a floor boss. He had no idea why they were acting this way. It wasn't natural in the least. No boss that he had ever encountered had just wandered off to the side of the room so it could stare at him from a distance. The sight was so disturbing that Kirito began to wonder if this was some sort of glitch.

In some multiplayer console games that he had played in the past, things like this sometimes happened after a particularly nasty lag spike. If the connection was poor, sometimes, the game would just give up on animating entities properly. Oftentimes these entities would just revert back to their default state, usually standing straight up with their arms out to the side, imitating a perfect 't'. Despite the lack of body animations however, these entities could still sometimes move around when they were like this. They could basically fly around in that 't' shape at whatever speed they were supposed to be moving at.

It could be downright disturbing when that happened in those games. But it almost looked like that's what was happening here with Illfang. The timing was suspicious. Illfang had started acting like this almost immediately after Kirito had summoned the nodachi. Maybe that had caused something screwy to happen in the system code. From Illfang's perspective he had had the weapon in his possession in one moment, and then it simply vanished in the next. That might have done something to mess up the boss.

Kirito's ' _this entire situation is fucked right up'_ senses were screaming at him.

' _What is up with this boss?!'_

It had a mysterious ranged attack already, and now it may or may not be glitched out? Kirito made a decision at that moment. He wasn't going to look away from the boss for a single instant. He had to tread extremely carefully.

Kirito and Illfang continued to stare at each other. But secretly, some part of Kirito was glad about this turn of events. His camera was recording all of this. This time, Kirito's horrible luck and the fact that the universe itself seemed to hate him would actually be captured on film, which would vindicate him. Nobody would ever be able to say he was exaggerating since he could just point to this video.

The feeling prompted from that realization, was similar to what he imagined catching real, undisputable footage of a paranormal event would feel like. Nobody could ever say he was crazy now.

Kirito paid almost no mind at all to the minions that he fended off, almost subconsciously. He would not lose focus on Illfang for any reason. He had to figure out what was going on here.

* * *

Kirito's willpower hit its limit at the thirty minute mark. For thirty uninterrupted minutes, he and Illfang had stared at each other. Illfang hadn't moved at all during that time, while Kirito had been fighting off waves and waves of minions.

But the fight had gotten much easier. After each new wave of defeated minions, Kirito had found the next wave a little easier. He began to memorize their attack patterns, and slowly adapt to them. Eventually, he started trying to optimize the process. He had figured out the most efficient way to kill them, and used that same method over and over again.

He would take a subtle step or two in one direction at a leisurely pace, and that would be enough to manipulate the kill-order. This was the technique he had developed when fighting those nepenthe swarms. When Kirito was at his peak, he wouldn't run, leap or spin anymore. He would walk at a casual, leisurely pace through the swarm of enemies he was fighting, with each step carefully calculated to manipulate the paths that his enemies took when travelling towards him. It would control the order, speed, and time intervals in which they all arrived at, delaying some by fractions of a second and speeding others up by similar amounts. It was geometry. Kirito would intuitively understand in an instant, by looking at the shape of the oncoming swarm of enemies, exactly how to kill them all without needing to exert any serious effort. All by controlling the rate at which they all reached him with extremely subtle footwork.

It was a strategy that came with experience. When fighting swarms, it simply wasn't possible to fight the way he used to. Where he would make these dramatic jumps, and swings, and fly all over the battlefield. He'd just get dogpiled if he tried that, or waste a ton of energy. His new style was all about efficiency, and economy of movement.

Despite the fact that these minions were actually decently high levelled monsters, Kirito was able to one-shot them with a quick jab as long as he perfectly struck the weak point in their necks. It was all that was required to get the job done, though it had taken him some time to actually figure this out. He had needed a lot of time to learn the intricacies of how they moved and attacked so he could manipulate it and use it against them in this way.

The minions simply didn't have an answer to Kirito's ridiculously high AGI stat. So exactly like all those nepenthes he had killed, it felt like he was cutting the grass again.

Throughout the entire process, Kirito didn't once look away from Illfang. But after thirty minutes, he finally decided to try and figure out what was going on. Frustrated at the lack of answers, Kirito finally decided to start closing the distance to the boss, himself. So he started advancing towards the giant kobold.

After only ten steps, Illfang finally moved for the first time. As soon as he did, Kirito froze in place and observed.

Illfang took a few steps backwards... and then came to a stop. Then it started staring at him once more.

Confused, Kirito took a few more steps.

Illfang backed away again.

The boss didn't seem afraid of him, but Kirito seriously began to wonder if that was what was going on. Was there some sort of fear mechanic that he didn't know about?

Kirito took a few more steps.

Illfang backed up.

At that point, Kirito got another idea. Maybe there was something in Illfang's programming that was telling it to maintain a specific distance for some reason. He had no idea why that would be, but it looked like Illfang was trying to do that.

But there was a wall behind the boss. So if Kirito kept advancing, Illfang would back into it and wouldn't be able to retreat anymore, failing to maintain that hypothetical distance. What would happen then?

Kirito decided to find out, so he started walking again. Continuing until he walked the boss right into the wall.

When there was no more room, everything suddenly changed. As soon as Illfang could no longer back up any further, all of his recent behavior vanished as if it was never there. He roared and instantly charged towards Kirito, exactly as he was supposed to be doing all along. The minion that had been standing at his side this whole time, followed suit.

' _What the hell is going on here?'_ It was as if Illfang had just now remembered that he needed to actually fight.

Abruptly, another plan entered Kirito's mind. He quickly ran up the side of one of the nearby pillars and grabbed his camera. Unfortunately, his camera could not be summoned to his hands in the same way that any other item could be. Kirito _could_ summon it, but it would delete the footage it was recording at that moment when he did so. It'd keep all of his old videos and photos, but not anything that was currently being created. This mechanic was designed to prevent him from doing anything crazy like throwing his camera vast distances through the sky while it was recording, and summoning it back just before it hit the ground as a way to map out an unexplored area.

Kirito backflipped off the pillar, and landed right back in the path of the charging Illfang. Back in the same spot he had been in previously when Illfang had stopped acting weird. Then he immediately pointed the still recording camera at the charging Illfang.

Since Kirito was standing back in the exact spot he had been in when Illfang had backed into the wall, by taking a quick image of the floor tiles, the pillars, and the other various distance markers throughout the room, he would be able to rewatch this footage later to try and mathematically determine exactly how far away that magic range was. He'd be able to do that with the footage he had been gathering this whole time as well, but he got another angle here, and that could only help.

Illfang had been trying to keep a certain distance between them for some reason, so Kirito wanted to know what that distance was.

With this series of images captured, there was only one more thing he had to do. Kirito watched as Illfang continued to rush towards him. He didn't attempt to flee or defend himself. He just pointed his camera up and watched Illfang charge.

At the last moment, as Illfang's axe came crashing down towards him, Kirito reminded the kobold just who that weapon belonged to by summoning it into his hand. As a result, the attack that should have cleaved Kirito in two had missed, since the weapon conducting it was no longer there.

Illfang suddenly found himself unarmed.

Kirito didn't attempt to take advantage of the situation, however. It wouldn't help. The plan wasn't to defeat the boss here. Just to gather information. And Kirito had gathered all he needed.

So he put the axe back where it belonged, in his inventory, and then ran out of the boss room.

He had footage to analyze, and plans to make.

* * *

"So, uh, hey Argo?" Timely Advice asked the girl sitting next to him.

"What's up, friend?" Argo replied.

Timely's eye twitched in annoyance. They were not friends by any means.

"I've been thinking."

"Uh-oh."

"Fuck you." Timely had been getting increasingly frustrated at the girl's persistent stalking. Since she was still doing so, Timely had been unable to escape from her in order to meet with his recent anonymous client, which meant he wasn't going to be making any more money from their arrangement. Once the recent set of ovules ran out, there would be no more. So this girl was eating into his profits, and doing so deliberately. And to top it off, the girl had been making these annoying, snide remarks whenever she had found an opportunity to, just like that last one. There was only so much of that that he was willing to tolerate before he finally just dropped his 'nice guy' facade and started treating her the way she deserved to be treated. Like a piece of shit.

"Touchy-touchy," Argo grinned. "Someone's sensitive today. But do tell. What were you thinking so hard about, Timely Advice?"

Timely glared at her, but ignored the jab.

"What will you do if I meet my client inside an inn room? One that you're blacklisted from?" He had been spending a lot of time trying to come up with schemes in order to escape his current situation. He had eventually decided to try running some of his ideas past her to see how she would react to them.

"How would you do that?" Argo asked, amused.

"My client pays for the inn room, sets it all up, and then I walk into it," Timely explained. "We both then teleport out after."

Argo frowned.

"Well, I'll tell you one thing. I'd certainly be mad at you if you tried that."

"Oh?" That sounded promising. "It sounds like this ultimate plan of yours might have a hole or two in it after all."

"It might," she agreed. "But that little scheme of yours requires you to make contact with each other without my knowing."

"How do you know that we didn't come up with that strategy in advance for this exact occasion?" Timely asked.

"I didn't know that. But since you haven't tried that yet, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you didn't plan that far ahead."

"So you did all this even knowing it could possibly backfire?"

"Exactly. Being in my position isn't about planning everything out perfectly. It's about taking calculated risks. If I fail, then I just open up the next plan. Simple as that. My plans actually fail more often than not. I just have a lot of backups ready to go when they do."

"So you've just been shooting in the dark this whole time?"

"Yeah. But I've got a ton of bullets."

There was a moment of silence as Timely deliberated over this new information.

"What'll you do if my client just gets another middleman?"

"Get angry, probably."

The longer this conversation went on, the more promising it seemed to become, from Timely's point of view.

"That doesn't sound very constructive," he teased.

"If that were the only thing I was doing, then you'd probably be right. Thing is, I'm running six simultaneous operations right at this moment. Yours isn't even all that important."

"Important enough to do it yourself, apparently," he grumbled.

"Not really. My presence just isn't needed in any of those other ops. So I could have chosen to run only five operations at once, or I could have come here to pick up a sixth. It's a side project."

Timely took another glance around his surroundings before finally noticing something in the corner of his eye that lifted his spirits considerably.

He smiled.

"Hey Argo?" He asked innocently.

"What now?"

"Are you scared of heights?"

Argo turned to face him after that seemingly random inquiry. She stared at him in suspicion for a few moments before finally giving her reply.

"Well aren't you just full of strange and foreboding questions today."

"Is that a yes?"

"That information is personal. It'll cost ya 500 cor."

"Why didn't all that other information you gave me cost me anything?"

"Oh didn't it? Sorry, sorry. I was preoccupied. Please, feel free to pay me what you owe anytime."

' _Oh yeah. This is going to be so good,'_ Timely thought. He needed to see her get knocked down a few pegs.

"Hey Argo?" He asked.

"What?" She sounded slightly annoyed now. As if she was finally starting to get bothered by all of his rapid questions.

"You should have just answered my question."

"Why?"

"Because fuck you, and you deserve everything that's about to happen."

Argo stared at him for the next few moments, confusion clear across her face. She raised an eyebrow, and opened her mouth to speak.

Timely would never forget the look on her face in that moment.

"Hrrk-!"

In an astonishing turn of events in full view of everyone in the town square, Argo was suddenly pulled off her position seated on the side of the fountain, into said fountain. She was dunked, becoming completely submerged under the water. Then she began picking up speed. Rapidly.

She flew out of the fountain, bounced off the ledge, and was bodily dragged across the pavement. She smashed into the side of a nearby building and was suddenly dragged up the side of it towards the top. She flew through a window on the fourth floor, into the building, but was only inside for a brief moment. A moment she spent smashing into various walls and pieces of furniture. She was quickly pulled out the other side of that building through the opposite window.

She was then pulled under the influence of gravity towards the ground, four stories down, through an awning, landing face-first into a fruit stand. There was a sickening splatter as her face buried itself into a pool of unidentifiable slime and muck. She was utterly coated, head to toe in juice, soaked to the bone.

The whole process had taken only a handful of seconds. That covered everything from minding her own business sitting on the ledge of the fountain, to getting dragged through a building and getting a face full of fruit.

All conversation in the vicinity had died out the instant all of these rapid developments had started occurring, creating a pin-drop silence as everyone in the area took in this spectacle.

After a few seconds, Argo slowly picked herself up. Shakily, she rose to her feet. It took a few moments for her mental faculties to reboot, but when they did, she reached down towards her waist and confirmed the fact that there was a rope currently tied tightly around her. She followed the length of it with her gaze and quickly found the smashed up crate that the other end had been tied to. Then she glanced up at the nearby building that she had just been dragged through. It took only about half a second longer for her to fully understand all the pieces behind what had just happened to her.

She had been lassoed. Lassoed with a rope that had been tied to a crate that had then been launched off the top of a building with considerable force. Dragging her along for the ride.

She stood in shocked disbelief as she tried visualizing all of this.

That shock turned to rage _real_ quick, though.

"What the _fuck_?!" She finally screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking at the end.

She was furious!

Argo glared at the stunned players in the square around her, looking for whoever was responsible.

But then the spellbound spectators finally broke their silence. They took in the fruit juice soaked Argo, and then let out a roar of uncontrollable laughter at the sight. Players were hunched over in pain, holding their sides, and crying their eyes out.

"Holy fucking shit!" Someone shouted amidst the crowd of hysterics.

"My sides!"

Argo immediately flushed beet red in embarrassment, as everyone started pointing and laughing at her. Almost a hundred players had just seen that happen. Nearly everybody knew who she was, and more than a few held secret grudges against her. Those few took great delight in seeing The Rat being publicly humiliated like this.

She looked down at her feet and shrank into herself, mortified.

To top it all off, a text prompt suddenly appeared on her menu detailing how much cor she now had to pay to the NPC owner of the fruit stand. She now had to pay reparations for destroying all the wares, even though it hadn't even been her fault.

* * *

**A few minutes Earlier**

' _Oh you have got to be kidding me,'_ Kirito thought after finally spotting his assistant in the middle of the town square.

Kirito had never seen Argo's real appearance before, but there was no mistaking those whiskers, and the teasing vibe that just spewed out of her in waves. He knew what her plan was the instant he saw the resigned expression on Timely's face. It was a common Argo tactic. To just follow a player relentlessly and never leave them alone. She planned to stalk Timely until the Nameless Merchant showed up again for a meeting. Then she'd change targets and stalk him.

But Kirito could not allow her to interfere with his plans like this. He needed Timely as an assistant for now. But he also needed to avoid Argo. Since he couldn't message his middleman to set anything up, however, he needed to come up with some sort of plan.

* * *

"This is the dumbest plan that I've ever come up with," Kirito grumbled. He couldn't even believe he had come up with it himself. It was something he would have expected to see only in some sort of cartoon with how utterly loony it was.

The first part of it wasn't so bad. Every now and then, Timely Advice would do a cursory scan of the area around him. The next time he did so, Kirito would simply flick his camouflage off. He would be inside a building at the time, on the fourth floor, overlooking the square when he did. The window was also open, and he would be standing in it. So when Timely finally got around to randomly taking a glance up there, he would see him, and Kirito would then turn his camouflage off and back on again.

It was a calculated risk. Timely did not know about Kirito's camouflage at the moment. So giving away this information could end up coming back to bite him in the future. However, it had an upside to it that Kirito deemed as worth this risk.

It was another instance of plausible deniability. Kirito could demonstrate this ability to his assistant and then say that from now on, he was going to be using it permanently, for the foreseeable future. Timely would then incorrectly conclude that the reason for this was due to all the heat that was on Kirito from the rest of the players. He would not randomly conclude that he was an orange player from just that.

This would allow Kirito to travel with Timely anywhere in the game, indoors or not, without revealing his cursor. He'd just tell his assistant that he was going to turn completely invisible everytime they were in public, and explain that he would always be following him from a few steps behind.

They would still be able to talk. Kirito's Hiding skill allowed this functionality. By fiddling with his settings, Kirito could selectively de-couple certain noises from his camouflage's muting function. If he wanted his camouflage to mute _every_ sound he made, he could do that, and this was what he usually did. But he could also tell his camouflage to not attempt to mute some specific type of noise, like anything he said out loud, or the sounds of his footsteps.

Doing this would actually strengthen his camouflage in one aspect. The less his camouflage had to hide, the stronger it would get, and the higher the Hide Rate would be. But doing this would also weaken his camouflage in another aspect. If Kirito spoke, or made some noise that was not muted, other players would hear it and would know exactly where to direct their Searching abilities to reveal him.

But this wouldn't matter in this instance because Timely would already know how this arrangement was supposed to work. Kirito wasn't trying to hide from him, just everyone else. So Timely wouldn't attempt to break the camouflage and would probably actually help prevent anyone else from doing so to ensure he kept getting paid.

And the whole point of going through this scheme was the simple fact that Kirito's cursor was invisible whenever his camouflage was active. So it'd still be invisible, but it wouldn't be seen as suspicious by his assistant that it was. It was plausible deniability. The cursor would be invisible because Kirito needed his entire body to be invisible, and that would just be a side effect. Not because he was orange.

But for any of it to work, Timely had to first know that Kirito had this ability. So when the opportunity finally presented itself, Kirito executed his plan. He flashed the ability, and Timely noticed him doing so.

At no point during the process did Kirito's orange cursor show, even when his form had been revealed. He was inside a building, technically, even if he could still be seen from outside since he was so close to the open window.

All Kirito had to do next is quickly show the item he held in his hand for Timely to get the picture of what his plan was. It should be pretty obvious. A noose, with a subtle gesture pointing over at Argo. Who wouldn't figure it out?

Argo was going to be so mad after this. But after all the teasing she had put him through in the past, some part of Kirito felt that it really was about time for some payback.

He had tried wracking his brain to come up with a different plan than this. But he hadn't been able to come up with anything. He needed this distraction to meet up with his assistant again. And he needed Argo to leave the area. With the conveniently placed crate inside this building, and the leftover rope he had in his inventory, this plan just seemed to make the most sense, crazy as it was.

"Argo," Kirito spoke into his currently recording camera, "if you're somehow watching this in the future, know this. I'm only doing this because I have to. You can be too stubborn for your own good." Kirito quickly tied one end of the makeshift lasso around the precariously balanced crate he had placed on the windowsill on the opposite side of the room.

It was a pretty straightforward idea. Lasso Argo, then kick the crate that the rope was tied to, out the window. The crate would then serve as a counterweight, pulling her off the ground and up the side of the building. Then Kirito could meet with Timely without any more issues, at least for long enough to come up with a plan of some sort.

The hardest part would be successfully looping the rope around her. He'd only get one shot at it. If he missed, he'd never get another chance since Argo would immediately figure out what was going on. He'd have to think of something else if that happened.

But she was sitting in a wide open area, upright, on a ledge. Vulnerable. So it wouldn't be too difficult a toss. He intended to record a video of this incident, so he pressed record on his camera, and positioned it in a good spot. Then he walked over to the window.

Easy does it.

He threw the lasso.

Bullseye.

His aim had been perfect. He could not have done a better job. As soon as The Rat was in the trap, Kirito activated a sword skill to initiate a spin, landed, twisted, and roundhouse kicked the crate out the back window as hard as he could possibly manage, firing it out the window like a cannonball.

Then he watched the proceeding events. He had a front row seat as Argo came flying into that very room only a few seconds later, missing him by only a few meters.

* * *

"Dude, she is going to kill me," Timely claimed.

"Why?" Kirito asked. "You didn't do anything." The two of them were inside a nearby building, after the incident had concluded.

"I may have sort of… taunted her, subtly, before it happened."

"Oh." Kirito stared at his assistant with dull eyes. He understood his fear now.

"Yeah. Oh."

"Well why did you do that?" Taunting Argo unnecessarily was a bad idea. Kirito had thought that this was obvious.

"I thought it'd be funny."

Kirito thought about this explanation for a moment.

"It was pretty funny," he admitted.

"You're goddamn right it was funny," Timely agreed with a smile. "I'll never let her hear the end of it."

"You could have acted totally innocent, though," Kirito pointed out, "and she wouldn't have expected a thing. We could have played it off as some old enemy of hers trying to get revenge for something she did long ago. Argo has tons of enemies like that."

"I don't think she would have bought that."

"But she wouldn't have been able to prove anything, either. Plausible deniability. Too late for that now, though." Timely was going to have to watch his back now. Kirito couldn't even imagine what sort of revenge scheme Argo would inevitably cook up against him.

"You're right. I guess I'll have to blackmail her into submission or something."

"How are you gonna do that?" _Blackmailing_ Argo sounded like a terrible idea. Timely wasn't anonymous, so Kirito had no idea how this would even work.

"I'll need some sort of humiliating nickname to call her for starters. See if I can spread it around. Something about fruits. Or slime. That was a brilliant touch by the way."

"It wasn't intentional," Kirito mentioned with a wince. He had not meant to do that. "That trap ended up working way better than I expected it to." It wasn't even supposed to have dragged her into the building at all. Just leave her hanging in the air. Not launched clean through and out the other side. He had clearly kicked that crate way too hard. Kirito was going to need to redouble his efforts in staying off her radar for good, now. If Argo ever figured out that he had been the guy to do that, she would hunt him down to the ends of the Earth for it.

"Why didn't you get sent to jail for it?" Timely asked.

"For what? I didn't do anything."

"You lassoed her, and dragged her through a building."

"No, the rope did that," Kirito explained with a small smile. "It just happened to be tied to a crate at the time that just so happened to fall off the side of a building at that exact moment. No player was involved." The anti-harassment system got confused whenever a player made a mechanical contraption like that one, and it didn't know who to assign blame to if someone ended up getting harassed by one.

"That is the grimiest loophole to get around the system that I've ever heard," Timely said with a shameless grin. "I love it."

"Pretty cool right?"

"Did you come up with that?"

"Definitely not. There are videos on the internet of the beta testers doing that sort of stuff. I learned it from there before logging in here." Timely didn't need to know the truth, so Kirito bent it a good amount here to distance himself from the possibility of being a beta tester. In reality, Kirito had fooled around with that mechanic himself back then in person, and had not seen any such videos, but felt no need to explain this.

"That loophole sounds like a serious, game-breaking oversight," Timely said. "Can you kill someone in a safe zone by taking advantage of that somehow?"

"No." Kirito had tried figuring out how to do that back then with a group of like-minded players, and none of them had been able to figure it out. "The worst you can do is knock them around a bit." The closest you could get to succeeding is by knocking a player out of the safezone and PKing them then. But that was extremely difficult to do.

"Well that's good at least."

"Yeah."

"So anyway," Timely scratched the back of his head, "we need to come up with a new way to meet. If Argo tries something like this again, we need to be ready."

"I'll tap you on your right shoulder," Kirito replied. They'd use that as a signal.

"What?"

"I'll go invisible with my ability, and tap you on your right shoulder when I want to meet up. Then you can go pick up an inn room, and I'll follow you there." It'd probably take some getting used to, as from Timely's perspective it'd probably feel like being touched by a ghost, and he'd have to learn not to react visibly to the touch or else risk coming off as suspicious.

"Sounds good," Timely agreed.

"Alright. Well, here's the next set of ovules," Kirito said as the two players started going through the drop trading process. "I'd also like to get another contract set up."

"What type?"

"I want to dump _everything_ I have off on you now," Kirito emphasized. He wanted to clear out his entire inventory of everything that he no longer needed. "All of my items that I don't need. Rare or otherwise. Not just the ovules." Kirito's inventory had started to get pretty bloated, and so he wanted to liquidate it as much as possible by getting rid of all his junk.

"I've been waiting for you to say that for a long time," Timely replied, excitedly. "I'll set it up with Agil."

"Cool."

* * *

The two players were walking down the street now, one invisible, the other not. The meeting with Agil had been surprisingly fast, and Kirito himself hadn't even needed to step inside the shop at all since the new contract worked the same way as the old one. He had just waited invisibly outside the shop while Timely took care of everything.

Almost 75% of his inventory had been cleared out. All that remained now were his survival supplies, and the state of the art equipment he was planning to take down Illfang with.

"That's a pretty powerful ability you have there," Timely spoke quietly, not wanting to rouse suspicion. It'd look like he was talking to himself if someone noticed, after all. "If I hadn't seen you vanish right in front of me, I'd have no idea you were there."

"Yeah," Kirito replied, "it's pretty useful." He was Timely's invisible friend now.

"That can't be from the Hiding skill, can it? There isn't even a trace of you anymore. How'd you get it?"

"Who knows?" Kirito replied, mysteriously.

"Ah, right. I forgot," Timely said. "Mister Mysterious here doesn't like to talk."

"Can you really blame me?"

"No, I guess not. If I were in your shoes I'd probably be doing the same thing."

"We're going to have to get used to meeting like this from now on."

"You could just add me as a friend," Timely pointed out. "That'd make things easier."

"I bet it would." Kirito still could not trust his assistant with the knowledge of his cursor, though. He had no idea how he would react. So it was best not to test it out.

"But you're not going to do that, are you?" Timely asked.

"Nope."

"Figures."

The two of them continued walking down the street until they reached the end of it. There, the two of them intended to go their separate ways.

"See ya later, invisible guy."

"Yeah. See ya later. Try not to let Argo kill you."

"Don't worry, I don't think she will. If she tries, I'll make sure to let her know that you were actually the guy to do that to her."

"Thanks," Kirito replied, sarcastically, as he started walking away.

Timely laughed at the reply, and started walking in the other direction without another word.

Kirito spent the next several hours coming up with a strategy for the following morning. Now that he owned Illfang's weapons and currently had them in his inventory, he needed to figure out a way to avoid suspicion when the players started their raid tomorrow.

He planned extensively for the rest of the day, and into the evening, and went to sleep only when he felt satisfied.

He'd be getting up early again.

* * *

"Hey, how's it going, Fruit Juice?" A player snickered at her.

Argo clenched her fists and kept walking.

Nobody had been able to pinpoint who had said it first, but someone had given Argo a new moniker.

After passing her on the side of the street a few hours ago and recognizing her, rather than using her name, this player had referred to her as 'Fruit Juice,' after remembering the infamous incident with the fruit stand that had happened earlier that day. Other players in the vicinity had heard this player use this name and had thought it to be funny. So they had spread it around even further. In almost no time at all, the story of Argo's public humiliation had spread amongst huge swaths of the player base and she was being constantly referred to by that name now.

This naturally, pissed her right off. Argo was absolutely livid about the whole thing, and she immediately renewed her efforts of actively searching for the player responsible for this with a vengeance. She didn't care about the player who had come up with the new name for her all that much. It was the player who had lassoed her in the first place that she was after.

Argo wasn't an idiot and knew exactly who it had been. Timely Advice had known about what would happen and had clearly been in on the whole thing, but the player who had ultimately been the one to lasso her like that hadn't been him. It couldn't have been. Argo had been sitting right next to him at the time.

The only explanation was that it was the Nameless Merchant. Maybe not him directly, but that player had definitely orchestrated the incident. He had been the only one to benefit from it. So he was the person that was now on her shit list, and that she blamed everything on.

Now all of that time that Argo had spent following Timely around had been wasted. Because now it was clear that those two players had successfully been able to meet up again without her being there to observe the interaction. They had probably come up with a plan to deal with her now, too.

But two could play at this game, and she had no intentions of giving up.

She had a _team_ of players following Timely around now. It wasn't just her anymore. These extra players were constantly surveying their surroundings to ensure that nobody could slip through the net again.

She would find this asshole merchant if it was the last thing she did. It was personal now.

* * *

**December 3, 2022, 2:06 p.m.**

' _This is it,'_ Diabel thought to himself as he finally spotted the boss room door. It had taken a lot longer than expected, but everyone was here now, and it was time for the raid to begin.

He glanced around at the other players following behind him. Many of them looked nervous. Others, determined. If he were being honest, he was pretty nervous himself, but he couldn't allow himself to show it on the outside. Many of these players were counting on him to remain confident.

Almost everyone had their menus open, doing their last minute checks.

After it looked like everyone was ready, he planted his sword into the ground. He had originally thrown around the idea of giving another speech of some kind, but the current mood didn't really call for it. Instead, he kept it short.

"Listen up everyone. I've got only one thing to say to you. Let's win this."

"Come on!" He spun around and opened up the door.

* * *

**Improvements:**

**Haley Dill, Sean Wales, Gabriella Gadfly**


	18. The Raid Part I

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**A/N: Thanks to Kurama for being a beta for this chapter.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

The players slowly made their way inside the boss room with hesitant steps.

No one spoke a word after Diabel's declaration. Not until they had all advanced far enough inside for the room to activate, anyway. When it finally did, everyone stood by and watched as Illfang picked up his axe and leaped into the center of the room.

The boss roared and the minions spawned.

"Commence attack!" Diabel shouted.

All of the players charged.

* * *

Kirito had been waiting inside for almost an hour before the rest of the players had arrived. He had entered the room in advance and had made all of his preparations.

While he had been on his own, he had been making various attempts at getting Illfang to demonstrate his glitchy behaviour once again, in the hopes of figuring out exactly how the mechanics worked. However, Kirito hadn't had much luck. He hadn't been able to replicate it. He could get Illfang to travel to the opposite side of the room and wait there, watching, like he had before, but he hadn't been able to lure out that mysterious ranged attack.

Eventually, as the scheduled time of the raid drew nearer and nearer, Kirito had been forced to abandon these attempts to avoid being discovered. When the time finally came, he had left the room and closed the door to reset everything, only to re-enter a moment later and hide in the corner. He had then waited out the remaining time until the players had shown up.

Kirito had no intention of trying to solo the boss again until he figured out exactly what Illfang had done to almost kill him back then. The Swat had opened up far too many unknowns. He firmly believed that soloing Illfang was only possible if he had a rock-solid plan that accounted for everything that the boss could do. So, until he understood all of Illfang's new mechanics, he was not willing to risk his life again so recklessly.

With that decision, he had decided to let the raid party give Illfang a shot themselves. He didn't believe for a second that they would actually succeed in the end, but it's not like he would be able to stop them from trying anyway. If he tried to confront anyone and explain Illfang's new mechanics to get them to reconsider the raid, uncomfortable questions would immediately be asked.

Who are you? Why do you know these things? Why should we believe you?

There was nothing that Kirito could really say without exposing himself. So, instead of trying to warn anyone that Illfang was not as he seemed, he'd just sit back and let them figure everything out on their own.

If it looked like someone was about to die and nobody else seemed to notice, then he'd step in. But only then.

There had been some problems with this wait-and-see approach that Kirito had first needed to solve, however.

The first one was the fact that Illfang would be unarmed when the players faced off against him due to the fact that Kirito had stolen his weapons earlier. Fortunately, he had thought of an idea about how to hide that detail from everyone the previous day.

He had discovered the last time he was in that room that Illfang would try to use his weapons if they were nearby, no matter if the system technically declared them as his or not. Illfang would still pick them up and try to use them if given the opportunity to, even though Kirito was listed as the owner.

That mechanic formed the basis of his plan. Before the players arrived, Kirito had done the reverse of what he usually did when Illfang was asleep in the room. Instead of sneaking around the room to steal the weapons while the boss was asleep, he had snuck around the room and given the weapons back.

They were still his, and Kirito could summon them back at any moment right out of Illfang's hands, but the crucial detail here was that none of the other players in the room would be able to notice this. The only way anyone would be able to tell that Illfang was using weapons that didn't technically belong to him anymore was if someone else made an attempt to claim them and got the message prompt during the process saying that they already had an owner.

But that was unlikely to happen, in any case. Kirito expected the battle to proceed as normal for the most part. The players would attack, slowly lower the boss' health, and then Illfang would switch to the nodachi at the appropriate time.

But he didn't think that the players would make it that far. Once Illfang started using his new ranged attack, he expected them to immediately retreat and regroup. It was just too much of a shock to deal with without having prior information.

Kirito needed to see that again. It was pretty much the entire reason why he was there at all. He had his camera perched on top of one of the pillars, recording everything. Having no intention of taking part in the raid himself, Kirito spied on the raid group from the corner of the room, hidden by his camouflage. He was there to collect information as a spectator, nothing more.

He expected Illfang to live to see another day.

In fact, most of Kirito's future plans depended on it.

* * *

Minutes passed by as the battle raged on.

There was nothing to note, really, about any of it. There were no intricate tricks being used by the players to get one over on the boss, or any other amazing plan going on in the background. It was all standard strategy that Kirito had seen dozens of times before.

There were three main battle groups. One handled the minions, one handled the boss, and the last one functioned as a reserve, allowing players to rotate out whenever their health got too low.

It was pretty much common sense how these groups functioned together.

Nobody there cared about squeezing out every last drop of DPS possible or being maximally efficient in this battle, so there were no advanced tactics in play. No one was going for a speed kill or anything like that. Since the majority of the players were new to boss battles, the only thing everyone cared about was getting a win, even if the victory itself was crude. All of the tricks that would start showing up on later floors that involved complicated player roles were nowhere to be found. There were no specialized players in the raid. No heavy tanks that focused entirely on blocking attacks. No potion runners, carefully keeping track of all the cooldowns. It was a straightforward strategy that basically allowed any player to do whatever they wanted to, within reason.

Group up and damage it till it dies. That summed it all up nicely.

Illfang was an easy boss to deal with if you ignored all of his glitchy behaviour, so nothing more complicated than that was warranted. Once these players got some more combat experience against other floor bosses, however, Kirito expected that they would start learning how to do some of that other stuff.

As the boss's HP got lower and lower, Kirito started to frown. Illfang's HP had gone below 50% yet, despite that, nothing unusual happened. None of Illfang's glitchy behaviour presented itself.

' _It'll happen any moment now.'_ Kirito was sure of it.

Illfang suddenly roared in pain as a group of ten players unleashed a devastating, coordinated attack on him.

Kirito nervously glanced around the room from his hiding spot. All the minions were being properly checked. Diabel was coordinating all the parties admirably, and everything was working exactly as planned. Everyone was doing their job.

Several more minutes passed by, filled with a cacophony of battle cries from the players, the sounds of an intense battle, and roars from the boss and his minions.

Diabel shouted out some more commands.

Illfang's HP lowered to one third.

Kirito continued to watch with increasing levels of disbelief as the players continued their assault.

A few more minutes passed.

Illfang's Hp dropped to a quarter.

Then 10%.

Then 5%.

' _It wasn't supposed to be like this.'_

Kirito should have been happy at their unexpected success. He really should have, and he knew it. But instead, he couldn't help but start to feel frustrated.

Because they were fighting Illfang on easy mode.

If the boss had been this easy when Kirito had last fought it, then he would have won hands down. He was sure of it. He had no idea why, but Illfang was being annoyingly lenient on everyone now. The boss hadn't once used its ranged attack yet. It hadn't really put up much of a fight at all, actually.

This caused a disturbing thought to cross his mind for the first time.

' _They might actually win.'_

Kirito surprised himself when he internally started rooting for Illfang.

He didn't want any of these players to die or anything, but at the very least, he wanted them to understand some of what he had gone through earlier by experiencing it themselves. He wanted them to understand that Illfang was unpredictable and dangerous, and should not be underestimated by any means. Kirito had nearly died fighting this boss, and he wanted these players to learn of this danger first-hand.

But that wasn't what was happening.

It felt as if he was a mountain climber, who had spent years and years of his life dedicated to a strict training regiment, all so that he could one day see what the world looked like from the summit of a huge mountain. Kirito had then made repeated, gruelling attempts to climb that mountain only to ultimately fail in the end and be forced to turn back. Then, as he reached the ground after this failure, he discovered that this group of players had taken a helicopter ride 99% of the way to the top, climbed less than 30 meters, and then returned to try and regale him with tales about what a harrowing experience it had been and how much better they obviously were at climbing than he was. Because they had ultimately succeeded in the end, while he had not. They had seen the view that had been Kirito's life goal all along while Kirito himself had been forced to give up on it.

It was vexing and completely unfair. It felt like they were cheating. But in reality, they were probably just getting unbelievably lucky. The worst part about it though was that these players didn't know that it was luck, so they were now probably overestimating their own collective skill. Not knowing that it was actually pretty lacklustre and that they were just getting favourable RNG the whole time.

Kirito wanted Illfang to make a genuine attempt to defeat these people. Not whatever this meagre effort was supposed to be. Illfang was getting his butt kicked in a completely one-sided, curb-stomp battle.

The rapier user, the girl that Kirito had spoken to a few days ago and who had wanted to off herself by fighting herself into exhaustion, stepped up next. She stood in front of the boss and delivered an unholy combination of strikes that sent it flying back into a pillar in a comical display of incompetence.

Raucous cheers from all around filled the room.

It was as if none of what Kirito had gone through had even happened. As if the universe itself had forgotten all about it.

' _Yeah, Illfang was actually super easy. A textbook boss battle with no complications. Only an idiot would have failed to win.'_

That was what the summary of today's battle was going to look like. And it pissed Kirito off a good deal more than it should have.

He glared at the boss from his position in the corner of the room as it struggled to stand up again. After making it to his feet, Illfang finally threw his weapons to the side and reached for his nodachi.

That was Kirito's last hope.

* * *

"Everyone step aside!" Diabel shouted as he powered up a sword skill. "I'll finish it!"

He charged forward but was caught unprepared as Illfang radically increased his speed in an instant.

Illfang bounded across the room at a frightening pace and lunged towards the raid leader.

' _Finally,'_ Kirito realized, relieved.

Illfang had upped his game a little.

Because the players had been surviving entirely on lucky breaks in the RNG in Illfang's attack cycles, when Illfang actually started putting in a little bit of effort, as he was supposed to be doing all along, it caught everybody flat-footed when it shouldn't have.

Kirito winced as the realization of what was about to happen struck him. He could see it in his mind's eye. Illfang was practically going to cleave Diabel in two. This presented Kirito with an uncomfortable decision. He knew exactly what he needed to do in order to stop it from happening, but his intervention would almost immediately guarantee Illfang's defeat.

Because the players had underestimated the boss and had been caught with their guard down as a result, Kirito was going to have to pay the price for it.

He hesitated.

It was completely unfair.

Deciding whether or not to intervene at that moment was a really tough decision, but, in the end, he could only shake his head with a grimace.

What real choice was there? There wasn't one. It was either intervene or let a player get killed. Since he didn't want to stand by and watch that happen, Kirito chose to do what he knew to be the right thing. His hand had been forced. He was probably going to have to face some fallout for what he was about to do, but at the very least, a player wouldn't die just because he chose to sit by and watch it happen.

At least he wouldn't add to his already lengthy list of regrets.

At the last instant, just before Diabel was dealt a killing blow, Kirito summoned the nodachi into his hand.

The weapon belonged to him after all, and weapons could be summoned back to the owner's hand, regardless of distance.

From the perspectives of the other players in the room, it seemed as if Illfang's weapon had simply vanished into thin air. There was no way for them to tell that it had teleported across the room, straight into the invisible hands of the player that actually owned it.

Kirito did not have any followup plan for what he had just done. He certainly didn't intend to reveal himself to everyone, but there was no doubt that Illfang's suddenly missing weapon would be questioned. Especially by Diabel himself, who had witnessed it disappear right before his eyes. Kirito had no idea how everyone would react to that. They might even think that it was a glitch of some kind.

But less than a second later, Kirito noticed a convenient detail.

None of the players were facing in his direction. Kirito was behind them, after all, near the boss room door. And all the players were located roughly in the center of the room in front of him.

There was a small window of opportunity at that moment that Kirito did not hesitate to take. It may have been too late, but it didn't matter. Anything he could do to remove suspicion from himself was worth it in his mind. So with his nodachi in hand, he spun around a single time with his helicopter technique to pick up the required momentum and tossed it at the opposite wall of the room as hard as he could.

It lost its invisibility the instant it left the range of Kirito's camouflage. Then the weapon smashed into the targeted wall with a violent clanging noise and then clattered onto the ground.

Many players spun around at the sudden noise behind them, and Kirito could easily observe their thought processes.

Kirito had changed the way the event would be perceived with that singular action. Now it wasn't the case that Illfang's weapon had vanished outright under mysterious circumstances, but it had instead ' _slipped out of Illfang's hand at an extremely fast speed without anyone noticing, and had launched itself into the corner of the room'_.

This, while a stretch, was a much more reasonable explanation than the weapon outright vanishing. It would not hold up as an explanation if anyone seriously scrutinized it, but it was plausible. More plausible than the alternative. Rather than a mysterious event that required extensive investigation, it would instead be seen as a simple, incredible stroke of luck for the blue-haired player whose life had been saved by it.

It had been a magic trick. A simple, subtle action intended to completely change how the event would be perceived by everyone there.

Kirito could only hope that none of the players had been paying close attention during that moment and that they would conclude that this is what had occurred rather than start questioning things too closely.

Illfang reacted to his missing weapon surprisingly quickly. He swung his fist at the immobile Diabel and sent him flying through the air. It was a devastating impact, but it wasn't lethal.

Kirito was not prepared for the direction that the raid leader flew in, however. Diabel flew through the air, skipped across the ground a few times, and landed right at Kirito's feet, only a meter or so away.

He stared at the downed player with widened eyes for a few moments, before looking up and noticing a bunch of players staring at him.

Not at Kirito specifically, but in the direction that Diabel had flown, which had simply caught him up by coincidence. Since nobody had any reason to use their Searching skills at the moment, however, their eyes did not notice him because of his camouflage. Nonetheless, it was still extremely uncomfortable that they were all facing in his direction, so Kirito intended to slowly slink out of their direct line of sight just to be on the safe side.

But he froze in confusion based on what he heard next.

"Diabel! He's dead!"

Kirito blinked.

He looked back down at Diabel's HP and noticed immediately that it was around 50% and holding there. He was nowhere even close to being dead.

' _What are they talking about?'_

Anyone with a pair of eyes would clearly notice that the blue-haired player was okay. Maybe he was roughed up a little, sure, but an HP potion or two and he'd be good as new. Kirito had no idea what they were talking about.

Illfang did not sit idly by as all of these events transpired. He suddenly surged into the crowd of players and started swinging his fists around, causing the entire raid group formation to start breaking down.

Kirito continued to watch as the players became more and more uncoordinated. With the sudden loss of their leader, they had been dealt a crippling blow that they couldn't recover from. Which he thought was odd considering the fact that Diabel was clearly alive.

Kirito looked back down at the blue-haired player. The man was lying face down, dazed. He took a closer look at Diabel's HP bar and noticed a debuff on it.

It was a stun. He had been hit hard enough to essentially become paralyzed for a few moments. It was a temporary thing, and he'd be completely fine once the timer expired. A detail which, again, should have been noticed by everyone else immediately.

In fact, now that he thought about it, Kirito found it incredibly strange how none of the other players rushed over to see if their leader was alright. Judging by how many friends the player had, he'd have thought that plenty of others would have been frantically checking to see if Diabel was okay.

But it didn't happen. Nobody spared their downed leader a second glance.

Over the next 30 seconds, the formation continued to fall into disarray. The rapier user made a genuine and admirable attempt to turn things back around, but she didn't have a partner to coordinate with. If she had been able to switch with someone it would have been a different story. But since she didn't, she failed.

Illfang backhanded her across the room into a pillar, stunning her and putting her out of action for a few moments.

A few other players suffered similar fates, and some were nearly killed. By that point, what happened next was inevitable.

"R-retreat! Fall back! We can't lose anyone else!"

Kirito raised his eyebrow when all the remaining players made a coordinated effort to pick up all the stunned players and carry them out of the room.

His disbelief rose to even further heights when everyone ignored Diabel and just left him there alone.

* * *

After the rest of the players left, Kirito spent the next several moments surveying the room.

Only he and Diabel remained inside. But for some reason, neither the minions, nor Illfang himself, went after the downed player, and Kirito had no idea why. It was as if Diabel was invisible to them somehow.

He just couldn't understand it.

' _Why aren't the minions charging towards him?'_

What could possibly cause a player to be invisible to―

It clicked right then.

Diabel was too close to him.

Kirito, on a hunch, frantically opened up his menu and navigated to his Hiding skill menu.

He had gained a new ability without noticing. His camouflage could now be extended to other players if he allowed it to. He could hide with other people as long as they were close to him. There would obviously be a penalty and the camouflage would be weakened significantly if he did so, but anyone within a certain range, unless Kirito disabled the new setting, could be hidden from view.

That's what was happening.

Diabel could have been launched on a million different trajectories, but due to an extraordinary fluke, he had landed exactly within range of Kirito's camouflage which had given him this new ability. Then a second fluke had occurred, as upon obtaining this new ability it was set up to be automatically active by default. It was an ability that was always active unless Kirito deliberately turned it off.

Because of those two flukes, the rest of the players had seen Diabel suddenly vanish and must have mistaken that for him being killed.

But, perhaps more disturbingly, what this meant was that if Diabel stood up and turned around, he would immediately spot Kirito since they were under the same cloaking ability.

Kirito immediately leaped away from the downed player.

Now it made sense to him why everyone else had left. They had seen Diabel suddenly vanish from view, so they had assumed him to be dead, obviously having no idea that Kirito was there.

Abruptly, Diabel stirred and stood up with a groan.

His stun debuff had expired, giving him the freedom to move around once more. After collecting himself, he pulled out an HP potion and looked around. He spotted Illfang and picked up his sword.

"So everyone else was forced to retreat, huh?" He questioned aloud, to no one in particular.

Diabel grinned and drank his potion. Then he pulled out another one and drank that too, bringing him back up to full health.

"Where do you think you're going!" He called out to Illfang, as the boss walked back towards his throne.

Kirito nearly face-palmed at how idiotic that was. He could predict exactly what was about to happen now. Diabel was exactly the type of player to try and act like some sort of hero and finish off the boss alone.

Illfang turned back around at the sudden sound but did not advance.

Kirito's heart froze as he recognized the behaviour.

Illfang was acting weird again.

The boss just stood back and watched. The minions, on the other hand, all began to charge. All apart from that single one, anyway. Just as had happened before, one minion remained at Illfang's side while the other five charged forward.

Diabel, however, didn't seem to notice the behaviour change at all. He broke into a jog, then a sprint, before finally engaging all five charging minions at once.

Kirito was immediately on edge. He started frantically trying to put together a contingency plan.

All manner of questions started racing through his head. What was he supposed to do if something happened now? What if Illfang used his ranged attack on this guy? Would Kirito be forced to reveal himself to save this player's life again?

Back when the rest of the players had been there they had been able to look after each other which had prevented the need for Kirito to have to step in directly to save anyone. No one else was there now, though. The only person that could watch Diabel's back was Kirito himself. And he probably would not be able to disguise the action in a plausibly deniable way like he had last time if it came to that. He'd undoubtedly be forced to reveal himself if things went south.

"I'm not going to let it end like this!" Diabel shouted as he battled the minions. "Not after all that's happened! We're so close! I'm not leaving until you die, Illfang! Do you hear me?!" His shouts echoed off the walls of the room.

' _This guy is like an anime character,'_ Kirito realized. And not in a good way. He was one of those hero types that refused to give up. A trait that would have been respectable in any situation other than this one.

Kirito just wanted the room to himself now. He wanted this player to leave so that Illfang could regenerate. Then Kirito would be safe to leave the room unattended without having to worry about the boss dying. This would give him the opportunity to go and safely eavesdrop on the failed raid party of players that were no doubt making their way out of the labyrinth, an act which might let him find out when they planned on making their next attempt on the boss. Kirito needed to find out what their schedule was so that he could plan his own experiments and attempts around it. But, for any of this to happen, Diabel had to leave first.

His stubborn refusal to do so was annoying. It was a completely hopeless battle with an inevitable outcome. Diabel wasn't anywhere close to skilled enough to pull off a win here on his own.

Not knowing what else to do, Kirito sat back and watched the player struggle for a while. He figured that Diabel would tire himself out and retreat eventually once the sheer weight of the self-appointed task became evident to even him.

Then Kirito would finally have the room to himself.

* * *

"Let go of me!" Asuna shouted at Agil, as she was carried like a sack of potatoes over the man's shoulder and carried further and further away from the room.

"Stop shifting around, miss. The battle is over," Agil replied. He didn't like how everything had played out any more than she did, but it was time to accept the reality of the situation.

"No, it's not!" She cried. "We can still win! Just let me go!"

Asuna elbowed Agil in the back of the head, forcing him to grunt in surprise and drop her.

Before Agil even had time to turn around, Asuna was back on her feet, and running in the opposite direction, leaving the rest of the retreating players behind her. She had wasted no time in sprinting back towards the boss room.

Agil considered going after her but thought better of it. Since all the players had left the boss room, the doors would have closed. When that girl finally made it back there, he realized, all she would see is a set of closed doors. If she tried to open them, she would find a fully regenerated Illfang inside. Bosses fully healed themselves every time all players have left the room, after all. This much was known from the guidebook.

Even if she were reckless enough to go back inside the room again, she'd be forced to turn back.

With that thought in mind, Agil set his sights on helping out some of the other wounded players instead of running after that girl.

He never would have caught up to her anyway since she was faster than him.

* * *

Kirito watched with a dark sort of amusement as Diabel's situation got progressively more and more hopeless. He was struggling with all of his might, but the odds he was up against were just impossible to handle. Diabel was on his last legs and wasn't even able to keep up with the minions who were all ganging up on him anymore. It was only a matter of time before it would become too much and he would be forced to withdraw.

In fact, that time had already come and gone. Diabel had been getting overwhelmed for the last minute or so. Constantly losing his footing and getting thrown to the ground, his HP had been lowering more and more. It was only thanks to his reckless, stubborn refusal to face reality that he was still there inside the room.

But that would fade in the end, Kirito knew. If it didn't, and if he made the stupid decision to fight himself to death the way that girl had a few days back, then Kirito would forcibly drag him out of the room kicking and screaming.

Even now he was planning out how he could go about doing that whilst minimizing the exposure to himself. If he could pull it off without the player getting a good look at him, without saying anything, and without showing off anything about his fighting prowess, then Kirito would be able to deal with that.

Diabel was thrown to the ground once again with a cry of surprise.

Kirito shook his head and prepared to step in. He took a careful, considering glance around the room and planned out the operation.

He'd jump behind Diabel, grab him by the back of his armour, and sprint as quickly as possible back towards the door, dragging the player across the ground behind him.

Diabel would be unable to turn his head fully around to see him properly, and Kirito would be in and out in only a handful of seconds. Kirito would then vanish as soon as he confirmed that the doors were closed and that Illfang was healed.

That would be that.

' _No wait, that won't work. I almost forgot…'_

His camera. Kirito would have to quickly pick it up first. If he left the room with all the other players while leaving his camera behind, Kirito didn't actually know what would happen. It might count as a player being present and stop the boss from regenerating even if the doors closed, so Kirito couldn't afford to take that chance. He glanced up at where he had hidden it and carefully considered his options.

If he simply summoned it back to his hands, he'd lose the footage it had been collecting since he had placed it up there, so that wasn't an option. But if he went to grab it now, he might lose the chance to save Diabel and the player could die as a result while Kirito was in the middle of climbing a pillar or something.

He'd have to grab it after, Kirito decided. He'd even be able to learn something new with this plan.

He'd drag Diabel out of the room and close the doors, leaving Illfang alone inside. Then Kirito would re-open the doors and jump back inside by himself. Then he'd use the locking switch to lock Diabel outside. Kirito would then have the opportunity to then grab his camera and teleport outside with either his ring or a crystal.

...But then Diabel would see, Kirito realized. Diabel would see him run back inside the room like this. The wannabe hero would then probably get extremely worried and start blabbering all about his mysterious saviour who had locked himself inside the boss room to all the other players.

So Kirito would have to figure out how to ensure that Diabel wouldn't see him when he did this.

But just when Kirito had decided on a workable plan, he heard scurrying footsteps coming from the door. He spun around and watched as someone else sprinted into the room and started looking around.

Kirito recognized her immediately.

The rapier user.

He inwardly cursed when the girl set her eyes on Diabel and rushed over. She leaped into the fray without a second thought and immediately started shifting the tide of the battle.

Her battle cry as she activated a Linear marked the destruction of all of Kirito's plans. Because Kirito knew that she wasn't going to be leaving anytime soon.

' _These goddamn heroes! Just get lost already!'_ Now he was going to have to figure something else out. His whole plan was just gone now.

"W-who―?" Diabel asked his saviour.

"It doesn't matter," Asuna replied. "I'm here to help."

Diabel grinned.

"Excellent. With the two of us here, we still have a shot!"

With their morale soaring, the two of them started working together and started to beat back the minions. They displayed remarkable teamwork given how little they seemed to know each other and seemed to regain the initiative in the battle.

But they did not stop there. As they punched through the group of minions, they immediately set their sights on the boss standing on the far end of the room and started rushing over with a pair of battle cries.

They defeated minions left and right as they charged across the room. As the two players crossed over into Illfang's magic range, the boss immediately stopped his weird glitchy behaviour and charged back towards them in response.

Kirito still had no idea why that happened. Once a player stepped within a certain radius of Illfang when he was glitched out and watching the battle with his minions from a distance, then everything suddenly just went back to normal.

"I'll attack first, then we'll switch!" Diabel ordered as they closed the distance. "You focus on the boss, and I'll keep the minions busy when they approach!"

"Right!"

Diabel parried Illfang's first attack and called out the switch.

The rapier user took the opening and dished out massive damage with a combination of strikes.

Illfang struck back, but Diabel stepped in front of the swing with another parry, calling out yet another switch.

The rapier user stepped in again and dealt out even more damage.

The two players repeated this procedure a few more times before eventually, the first of the new set of minions arrived.

"Keep him busy!" Diabel ordered. "I'll finish off the minions!"

"I'll do my best!"

Kirito's hopes were raised slightly as he continued to watch the proceeding events.

Their tactic wasn't going to work, he immediately realized. Diabel was not able to kill the minions fast enough to clear them all out before more arrived. So the rapier user was stuck kiting the boss around forever, without having the opportunity to deal any more damage to it. So they were immediately bogged down in a stalemate situation.

It was not immediately obvious that they had what it took to defeat the boss, even when they worked together. It was very much possible that they would still lose, Kirito realized.

It could actually be advantageous that the girl had shown up, now that Kirito thought about it. With this girl here now, she could do all the work in dragging Diabel outside if they failed at defeating this boss. Kirito himself might not even have to lift a finger. He could just pick up his camera and leave after these two were gone.

So he continued quietly rooting for Illfang, hoping that the kobold would take home the win in the end. But, just in case, he tried to come up with a contingency plan.

It would be annoying, but if he could get both of them outside, even if they saw him go back inside for his camera after, then he could still make that work. The two players would blab about the mysterious cloaked player that they had seen, but it would not be able to be traced back to him specifically. Argo would have a field day with the information, and that was always bad news, but at least the players would lose the battle with Illfang in the end, and Kirito would be given the opportunity afterwards to make a solo attempt sometime in the future.

All the problems in his plans stemmed from his lack of opportunity to grab his camera. Kirito glanced back up to where it was perched. If he picked it up now, then most of his plans would be simplified. But at the same time, it was already placed in the perfect position. If something happened during this fight, there was no better location for it to be in, in order to see the event clearly. So if he grabbed it now, he might miss something. So he decided to leave it there.

Kirito continued trying to plan while he watched the battle before him.

The two players had lost their edge. And it was now starting to become obvious, even to them.

"Shit!" Diabel cursed. "This isn't working!"

"I've got a plan!" Asuna declared.

"R-really?! What?!"

"We'll switch targets together!"

The rapier user deflected Illfang's strike and turned back towards the minions. She leapt into the group and killed two of them, while Diabel finished off the rest.

Kirito frowned.

He could immediately see what their new plan was. Diabel had been killing the minions one at a time, individually. This had caused them to respawn in the same manner. One at a time. This meant that they had been respawning continuously, never allowing the two players to have a break from fighting them. By killing them all at once like they had, they had all respawned at once, sure, but they now all had to cross the room towards them together.

There wasn't a trickle of minions, one arriving every few seconds anymore. They were now arriving in huge groups, separated by much longer periods of time, which gave them several seconds in which they could inflict damage on Illfang while they were waiting for more to show up. Then they would repeat the process.

It took only a single iteration of this plan for Diabel to understand it in its entirety.

"You're a genius! This can work!"

After clearing out the minions they switched their attention back to the boss and pulled off a switch. They dealt a decent amount of damage, and then as the next group of minions arrived, the rapier user deflected Illfang's weapon and the two players changed targets once again.

It took them about five seconds to clear them all out, and then they turned back to face the boss just in time to receive his counterattack.

Then they did it again.

After only a few more iterations, they had it down to a routine.

Kirito would have been impressed by them if he weren't so irritated.

They had the edge again, and Illfang was starting to run out of HP pretty quickly. Most of it had already been depleted from the earlier battle. So there were only a few percentage points left. If he had been at 100% HP when these two had started doing this, this strategy would have been impractical, as it would have taken all day to get anywhere with it. But with only that small amount of HP left, Kirito realized that there was a very real chance that they would finish it off here. It'd only take a few more minutes at the rate they were going.

Kirito continued to watch their progress with increasing levels of frustration.

All of his plans and preparations were going to be ruined by these two. Everything he had worked for to be able to finally solo the floor boss would have been for nothing. But perhaps most importantly, once Illfang died, Kirito would never be able to find out the answer to what had hit him that day. The Swat. The truth behind that mystery would die forever when Illfang was gone.

A battle started to wage inside him.

He should have been happy for them. He really should have. The players needed this victory to give everyone hope for the future. They had worked incredibly hard for it. So he made a genuine attempt to just… let it go. To let them have their victory and move on.

But at the same time, there was a fundamental piece of information that would go undiscovered if that happened.

Kirito's next actions came down to the answer to a single question. What was more important? Taking a step towards beating the game? Or finding out more information on how the world worked?

Progress vs Knowledge.

If Illfang died now, nobody would ever learn about that mysterious attack. But if he didn't die, the players might spiral down into a pit of collective hopelessness and despair at their failure.

So what was more important?

It was an incredibly difficult decision, and Kirito found himself right on the fence. He knew that he could be convinced either way.

This was a huge decision. He realized at that moment that there was a strong possibility that the game's history was going to be completely determined by his actions in the next few moments. He had the power in his hands to completely change everything. And he knew that for the rest of his life, potentially, he would think back on this moment as either his biggest regret or the best thing he had ever done.

Eventually, he had to choose.

So he did. He went with his gut. It was a selfish choice, he knew, but the rest of the players weren't going to be on his side in the future anyway.

He had to know. He just had to. He'd never be able to live his life in peace again if he never figured out what had happened that day. The fact that he had nearly been killed by a mysterious force would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Would it ever happen again? Was Illfang even involved in what had happened? Even Kirito himself began to doubt what had happened back then.

But he had to figure it out.

Killing the boss as quickly as possible was not necessarily the best way to complete the game. Sometimes, deliberately keeping it alive was better, as counterintuitive as that might seem. By keeping it alive and studying its strange behaviour it might be possible to learn something fundamental about how the game they were all stuck in was programmed. And that information may very well prove critical somewhere down the line.

It could save lives. So many players had already been killed due to rushing into situations with a preconceived set of notions from the beta test and having those notions suddenly proved inaccurate.

So yeah. The players could kill the boss now, and maybe get to the next floor a few days, or even a week faster, but they would have nothing else to show for it. The path Kirito was deciding to go down would delay the players in the short term, but would give them the opportunity to acquire new knowledge and progress everyone's understanding of how the world worked.

Kirito was pretty sure that there wasn't a right or wrong answer to this dilemma. Everyone would have differing opinions. But nobody else's opinion really mattered at that moment because he was the only person in the driver's seat.

It was his choice alone.

And the final nail in the coffin solidifying this choice was a feeling of hope. As long as Illfang remained alive, Kirito still had a chance to solo him in the future. Which was too big of a chance to let slip away.

It could not be overstated how hugely beneficial that xp drop would be. It would practically guarantee his survival when the rest of the players inevitably decided to turn on him somewhere down the line.

He would be too strong to be murdered by someone else afterward, and it would give him so much extra free time. He would not have to spend every spare minute of his time desperately grinding to remain on top of the rest of the players anymore. He could instead spend all of his extra time figuring out how to make potions and how to refine his fighting style. He'd be free to explore new ways to gain strength that did not involve levelling up and getting xp. His spins were a perfect example of that. He had so many more half-thought-out ideas along those lines that if he just had the time to explore them, he could completely revolutionize his whole fighting style.

But he needed that time. The breathing room that successfully soloing a boss would give him. And it would even allow him to gain the strength required to solo more bosses in the future.

It was a window of opportunity that would close forever if he allowed it to.

He couldn't allow it to.

If he let these players take this kill right here, there may never again be a second chance to create the necessary gap between himself and the next strongest player. He'd end up months ahead if he succeeded in that, easily. Perhaps even doubling his level just like that.

Kirito wanted to see his sister again. This meant that he wanted the players to beat the game eventually, sure, but he also wanted to still be alive when they did. And that meant that on an occasion like this, he had to make the selfish choice because nobody else would be watching his back in the future. He had to be strong enough to survive against literally everyone. And this was the only way to do that.

It was all about increasing the odds of his survival in the long run. Even if that meant stealing all the xp that Illfang could give and hoarding it for himself.

* * *

Kirito's Hiding skill was finally about to be flexed to its utmost extent. He had never tested out its full range of abilities in a real-world situation, but the time had finally come.

Kirito pressed a single button on his menu, and that set everything up.

His Hiding skill could do so many things. It could turn him invisible, it could mute the noises he made, it could hide his cursor, but it could also hide his name.

A player's name was typically hidden by default, whether a player chose to hide it or not. But a player with the Searching skill could reveal it if they were a high enough level. This naturally would have been a disaster, so Kirito had been hiding it this whole time, just as he had with his cursor.

His Hiding skill had a Global Hide Rate that he could allocate to all of his various abilities. His Mask ability, for example, was used to hide his face. It had a Hide Rate that, when depleted, would disable the ability. But Kirito could control how big that Hide Rate bar was by either lowering or adding Global Hide Rate to it.

He could cut the ability's maximum Hide Rate in half if he wanted to, and reallocate that extra Hide Rate to increase the strength of other abilities. Such as Hiding his cursor. So in some sense, Kirito could control the failure priority of all of his abilities by carefully micromanaging this Global Hide Rate, and how he distributed it across his abilities.

He could set it up so that under the scrutiny of a Searching player, his face will always be revealed before his cursor would. Or vice versa. Or that his name would always be revealed last. There were so many options. He could even make presets with different Global Hide Rate distributions across all of his abilities, and he could set thresholds and basic programs to force his own Hiding abilities to fail early based on certain conditions, and automatically reallocate the freed up Hide Rate to other abilities, even during the middle of a battle.

It was fantastically complicated, but Kirito had had more than enough time to figure it all out. And he was making use of all of that knowledge right at that moment to ensure that no matter what happened, his next actions would never be traced back to his name.

Even if his orange cursor was revealed, it didn't matter. Even if his face was revealed, it might not matter either because he had never revealed it to anyone before so he would not be recognized. Not even Argo had seen his real face. But his name had to remain hidden at all costs. Lots of people knew it, after all. No connection could be made between his name, face, and cursor, and all of Kirito's Global Hide Rate management reflected this.

So when the time finally arrived where he made his decision to interfere with these two players, he was nowhere near as nervous as he could have been. He would remain anonymous throughout, and in the near-impossible situation that his identity was about to be revealed, he could simply teleport out.

Kirito had steeled himself. And this allowed him to do something that he never in a million years would have thought that he'd ever do.

Just as Diabel would have landed the finishing blow on the boss, Kirito utterly _clotheslined_ him.

"No," Kirito stated calmly as he appeared out of thin air.

He took Illfang's side.

These two players had destroyed any possible plan he could have made to end this situation peacefully. So his priority was to now get them to leave under the threat of force. Then he'd lock them outside, take his camera, and leave on his own afterward.

While this act should have guaranteed that he would become an immediate enemy of all the rest of the players, it would not due to one simple fact.

Kirito was still anonymous. These players would learn that _someone_ was working against them for a mysterious reason, but they wouldn't be able to figure out who it was, or why. This could even cause everyone to be much more cautious during the next boss fight due to the possibility of meeting this player again, which could have the accidental side effect of saving even more lives due to the extra preparations they made.

Having a common enemy could do the players some good. It could even redirect the player's ire towards the beta testers toward him instead.

Perhaps it was just a list of excuses justifying his selfishness to get the xp drop from the boss and hoarding it all for himself, but at the very least, depending on how you looked at it, this could be seen as a net gain for everyone.

It certainly made Kirito feel a little better about the whole thing, anyway.

Diabel recovered to his feet, and Kirito kicked him as hard as he could. Diabel crashed into Asuna and the two went tumbling backwards across the room.

Kirito was not letting Illfang die today. Not by these two.

Not yet.

Sugu's face was burned squarely in the center of his mind, serving as a powerful motivator.

Kirito parried Illfang's counterattack and sent the boss flying backwards with it. Taking the opportunity, he then leaped over towards the other two downed players, placing all three of them outside of Illfang's magic range.

Kirito didn't want to have to deal with both Illfang and these two players at the same time.

Illfang froze after all players left his magic radius, as expected, and the boss walked over towards the back wall of the room once again.

Kirito may not know why the boss did that, but it didn't matter. He could still take advantage of whatever mysterious mechanic it was.

Diabel groaned as he sat up.

"What the hell?!" He shouted. "Who―?"

"Did you just punch me?" Diabel interrupted himself. "What the hell were you thinking?! Illfang was a single hit away from death! We had him!"

"Get out," Kirito ordered.

"What?"

"Get out of the room."

"That voice. It's you."

Kirito winced slightly as he hadn't considered that angle in this plan of his. There was a decent chance that his voice would be recognized by this girl. Even after all of his preparations, he did not have the ability to disguise his own voice. And he was nowhere near skilled enough as an actor to pull that off convincingly on his own. So even though he was wearing a pretty nondescript cloak that was not recognizable, he could still be recognized by anyone that had heard his voice before.

He was going to need to be extremely careful about who was in the room whenever he decided to speak. Thankfully, however, he had not told this girl anything about who he was. So even though she recognized his voice, she had no way of knowing his identity since he hadn't given her his name. The best she could do is recognize him as the same guy she had talked to a couple of days ago.

A group of minions tried to attack Kirito from behind. While Illfang himself may have gone over to the far side of the room, the minions had not, and were still rearing for a fight. As they arrived, Kirito killed them all in an instant with a spin. He landed on his feet as if nothing happened.

"Woah." Diabel made his amazement at the casual slaughter of what to him appeared to be challenging monsters, clear. "Where the hell were you during the raid?"

Kirito didn't respond.

"Why did you stop us?" Asuna asked.

"Isn't it obvious?" Diabel replied. "It's the Last Attack Bonus. He wants it for himself."

"The Last Attack Bonus?" The girl questioned. "What's that?"

The next set of minions approached Kirito from behind, so he immediately made his move. He abruptly hurled a pair of swords at the two players causing them to flinch. The blades skimmed just past their faces, barely missing them. This was intentional. In the instant that they blinked and turned away, Kirito activated Hide and vanished. Neither of them saw him disappear with the ability directly with their eyes, giving him the chance to slip away. The minions now set their sights on the two remaining visible players, ignoring Kirito.

"What the hell?! Are you trying to kill us?!" Asuna shouted, enraged at the sudden attack. It was only then that she noticed that the player was gone. "W-where did he go?!"

"Look out!" Diabel shouted. "The minions!"

The girl growled as she was forced to parry the first mace sent her way.

Kirito summoned the swords he had thrown, back to his hands, after jumping behind a pillar. He had not wanted to demonstrate his Hide ability right in front of their eyes in order to sow the maximum amount of confusion in these two that he could, which was why he had thrown the weapons at them in the first place. This had disguised his activation of the skill. When they had opened their eyes to see that he was no longer there, they would not be able to figure out exactly what had happened, then. It would keep them guessing.

He hoped that now that they knew he was there and was willing to stop them from getting the kill, that this would be enough for them to retreat for now. Things wouldn't escalate any further if they just took the signal and left.

As the two players re-engaged the oncoming minions, Diabel began to explain his theory to Asuna.

"The Last Attack Bonus is a rare drop! Whoever lands the last hit on the boss will receive it! This guy must be after it!"

"Are you telling me that he stopped us for a selfish reason like that?! Just so that he could land the last hit?!"

"I'm saying that it's likely."

"But he didn't even take part in the raid! We did all the work! Where did he even come from?!"

"He must have followed us here and used the Hiding skill to turn invisible. Then he waited for his opportunity to strike."

"That jerk! I'll kill him!"

Kirito grinned after overhearing their conversation.

The Last Attack Bonus was usually pretty good, but it was not even close to being enough to justify his current actions. If he wanted that, he could have just bought it off of whoever ended up getting it. But he supposed that since there had been multiple instances back in the beta test of a player trying to snipe the Last Attack Bonus, that it was at least a plausible theory as to why he was doing this. So it made sense why these two had thought that.

"Let it go, Asuna!" Diabel exclaimed.

"What?! Why?!"

"As long as Illfang dies, it doesn't matter who lands the last hit. All that matters is that we win. So just stay back here with me and let him finish it off. I just want the fight to end."

"Still…!"

Kirito watched them continue to fight the minions. They didn't understand what his intentions were and assumed that he was trying to kill the boss himself. There was no way that they would believe anything that he said, so he had no intention of even trying to explain what his real plans were. Even if they knew, they would still probably try to get in his way.

So he intended to say nothing to them. He would not try to get them to see his side of things, and there would be no negotiation. Kirito was going to do everything in his power to ensure that things went his way, even if that meant stopping these two himself.

He took a glance at Illfang while the two other players were occupied.

Another crazy idea had struck him. Since the two other players seemed to be waiting for him to finish off Illfang, they were hanging back. So Kirito would not be interrupted for the next several moments at least, giving him the opportunity to test this idea out.

Kirito walked over to Illfang with his camouflage still active, ensuring that he would not be seen, pulled out an HP potion, and poured it out over Illfang's foot.

It was something that he hadn't ever expected to find himself doing.

He had no idea what would happen when he did it, either. Nobody had ever tried healing a boss before and furthermore, nobody had tried healing someone without getting them to directly ingest the potion itself. So Kirito didn't know if there were any healing effects from pouring a potion out over someone's skin. He was testing both of those things out at once while the other two players were distracted.

Illfang needed to be out of the danger zone.

Even though Kirito was right next to the boss, Illfang did not see him, as his gaze was focused on the other two players in the distance. And it also seemed as if Kirito's healing of the boss didn't register as an aggressive action. So Illfang made no attempt to wildly thrash around either to try and find out what invisible player was doing it.

The boss just let it happen. And it worked. Illfang's HP began to rise, so Kirito pulled out another potion, and emptied it out as well.

He had a ton of them stocked up.

* * *

Diabel and Asuna continued to battle the minions for a while, both of them still quite irritated at the recent turn of events. But since they had both agreed that they just wanted Illfang to die, they were willing to let the new player have the Last Attack Bonus. In the meantime, since they had gotten so used to defeating the minions, they started to have a conversation in the middle of the battle.

"So your name is Diabel, right?"

"Yeah. It is. I overheard yours earlier. Asuna right?"

"Yeah."

"You're pretty good."

"How are you still alive?"

"What do you mean?"

"We all saw you die earlier."

Diabel blinked.

"What?" He asked, baffled.

"It's true," Asuna replied. "When you tried to finish off Illfang in front of everyone like that and he hit you and you went flying, you disappeared."

"What are you talking about? I didn't die!"

"What happened then? You vanished as soon as you hit the ground. Everyone saw it."

"I... vanished?"

"Mm."

"I have no idea what would cause that." He had no idea at all. That didn't even make sense to him.

"It's why we left," Asuna explained. "We thought that you died so we retreated."

"I see. I have no idea what happened then."

"A lot of strange things happened today."

"No kidding. But at least it'll be over soon."

"He sure is taking his sweet time, though," Asuna grumbled in irritation.

Eventually, after a few more minutes of fending off the minions, they started to realize that something was wrong.

"What is that guy doing?" Diabel asked, rhetorically. "Why is he taking so long? Illfang's almost dead."

"Well, he better hurry up!" Asuna shouted. "These things are annoying!"

Diabel took a look back at Illfang's HP and noticed something alarming. His heart lurched in his chest as he noticed it increasing visibly. Far faster than it should have been on its own. Illfang was almost back up to 5%.

"Asuna! Illfang's HP!"

"What about it?!"

"It's healing!"

"What?! How?!"

"I don't know! But we have to stop it!"

"Right!"

They batted aside the few remaining minions with ease and charged forwards again toward the boss.

* * *

Kirito noticed the development and immediately stopped what he was doing. He sprinted back over to intercept them before they got too close to the boss. He did not want Illfang to start attacking just yet, so he needed all visible players to remain outside of that magic range.

He shook his head in disappointment and stuck his leg out, tripping Diabel to the ground, causing Kirito's camouflage to deactivate again.

"I thought I told you two to leave."

"You again?!" Asuna shouted. "Stop interfering! Can't you see that Illfang is healing! If you aren't going to finish it off then we will! You're taking way too long!"

Seeing that his refusal to explain anything wasn't doing him any favours, Kirito decided to take the next step.

"I'm not trying to kill the boss," Kirito admitted.

Such a confession was bound to turn both players against him, but Kirito was prepared for that. He was hoping that the prospect of a PVP battle between them would cause them both to back down.

"What the hell does that mean?!"

Diabel slowly stood up, and a steely look went across his face as the reality of the situation started to become apparent to him.

"Asuna," he interrupted her tirade.

"What?!"

"Look at his hand."

Kirito took in a deep breath and sighed, gripping the handle of his sword a little tighter. He was preparing himself for what would no doubt be a pitched battle. These two were starting to understand the situation, and that would cause them to either try to fight him or try to run away. He was hoping for the latter.

"What about it?!" She took a look and noticed a health potion there. "That's an HP potion, right?"

"It is," Diabel confirmed.

"What's so important about it?" Asuna asked.

"He's been healing Illfang with them."

"W-what?" She stuttered in disbelief, as the situation became clear to her.

"He's not trying to kill the boss," Diabel explained. "He's trying to kill us."

Kirito blinked. So they still didn't quite understand what his intentions were. But he could still make this work. He needed to correct that assumption, though. If they thought he was trying to kill them, they may think that there was no choice but to fight for their lives. He needed to emphasize that they were free to leave at any time and that that was all that he really wanted from them. He didn't want either of them to get desperate and think that their lives were on the line.

There was an intense moment of silence as the two shell-shocked players faced the unknown hooded player before them with fear and uncertainty clear in their eyes.

Kirito decided to clarify their positions to them. He broke the silence with a chuckle.

Asuna immediately narrowed her eyes, recognizing that laugh from the last time they had met. She knew that it was directed at her again. He was laughing at her!

"What's so funny?!"

"Sorry," Kirito apologized. But mentally, he filed away the fact that she seemed to not like being laughed at for future reference. "It's just funny how stupid you are, is all. At any moment either of you can turn around and leave. If I wanted you dead I'd have killed you already. I already told you what I want. I want you two to get out."

"Why?!"

"It doesn't matter," Kirito said.

"If we do leave, Illfang will survive!" Diabel pointed out.

"Yeah, he will. That's the point."

"Why do you want that?"

"Why are you doing this?" Asuna asked. "Didn't you tell me earlier to beat Kayaba at his own game? Why are you suddenly trying to stop me now?!" She had been utterly mesmerized and inspired by the advice that this person had given to her, so it had come as a shock that he now seemed to be her enemy.

Kirito didn't answer. He didn't think that the girl would understand that killing floor bosses quickly was not necessarily the best way to win the game in the end. Sometimes, taking a step back and learning something fundamental about their actual circumstances was more important. Studying Illfang's behaviour could reveal fundamental truths about how the game was programmed, which could, in turn, offer valuable insight into future bosses. This could save more lives in the long run even if it did come at the cost of extending their collective time inside the game slightly.

It was ironic. Everybody there was fighting for their beliefs. Kirito wanted information, and these two wanted a victory so that they could advance to the next floor. Even at that moment, Kirito wasn't sure about who was right. He knew that he was still pretty much on the fence about the whole thing. The only thing that had tugged him over to the side he now stood on was the possibility of getting the chance to solo Illfang later on if things went his way. It might have been a selfish and paranoid desire, but he saw it as justified to ensure his long term survival, and to be able to meet with his sister again.

There was no way that he could get them to understand his point of view, however, as Illfang had not demonstrated his ranged attack to them. So they did not know that the boss was hiding something that was worth investigating like this, and they certainly would not believe anything that Kirito said.

So he said nothing.

Instead of answering, Kirito hurled a pair of swords at them again, causing them to flinch. This disguised his activation of Hide once again.

"Urgh! Stop doing that!"

Kirito vanished just in time for the next wave of minions to attack them once again.

"You know this guy?" Diabel asked as he was forced into defending himself from the minions.

"Y-yes. At least, I think. He… helped me. Saved my life."

"Why is he trying to stop us then? Who is he?"

"I don't know! He never told me his name!"

The two players looked up just in time to see Illfang's HP increase again. While they were distracted with the minions, the hooded player had evidently taken the opportunity to start healing the boss once more.

"God dammit!" Diabel raged. "I won't let you take this victory away from us!"

Diabel glared, opened his menu, and activated his Searching skill, having fully understood how this player was vanishing from his sight. Since there was almost no cover in the room, and since he was decently levelled with the skill, Diabel was able to almost instantly shatter the camouflage of the hidden player.

* * *

Kirito cursed.

There was almost no cover in the room and the surroundings were clear as day, rendering his camouflage far more fragile than he was used to it being. He would not be able to heavily rely upon it.

Thankfully, however, it was only really his camouflage that suffered from this drawback. The bright light in the room didn't weaken his cursor or name hiding abilities. Which sort of made sense. Hiding a cursor was supposed to be analogous to being able to hide your true self from others, which didn't really depend on what was going on in the environment. It only really depended on how you acted and on how you carried yourself. Bright lights and dark rooms played no part in that.

But this forced him to make another tough decision. Kirito could increase the strength of his camouflage by adding more Global Hide Rate to it in order to make it more effective and to try and compensate for the environmental effects, but by doing so, he would weaken his other abilities. Making it much more likely for his cursor, name, or face to be revealed.

There were two choices. The all or nothing approach, where he bet everything on his camouflage, which would successfully hide both his cursor and his name if it never went down, or he could take the safe approach, which involved leaving his camouflage's Hide Rate as is and keeping most of his Global Hide Rate tied up in his more important abilities.

He chose the latter option. Not having an effective camouflage would make defeating these two a bit harder, but he could not risk his name being known, especially now that Diabel had revealed that he had a decently high levelled Searching skill.

Kirito would need to spend most of his effort hiding his identity, rather than hiding his appearance.

Thankfully, however, neither of these players had seemed to notice his missing cursor yet. Or if they did, they believed that he was hiding it only to avoid being spotted from a distance. Cursors were generally pretty easy to see, so players that wanted to remain hidden but did not intend to use a full camouflage to do so would hide their cursors and take cover instead, so this explanation was plausible. They didn't seem to jump to the conclusion that he was orange just yet.

He wasn't sure what they would do if they found out, either. It'd either prove advantageous, or disastrous. They'd either run out of fear of him being a PKer, or they would try to capture or kill him for the same reason. The situation might destabilize either way, so Kirito did not want to reveal that piece of information just yet.

Illfang suddenly noticed Kirito now that his camouflage was down and he had been revealed, and immediately swung at him.

Kirito leaped out of the way just in time.

"Asuna, you finish off Illfang! I'll handle this guy!"

"Right!"

* * *

Diabel's gaze zeroed in on the hooded player.

He had immediately noticed how suspicious the player was. No cursor, no name, he couldn't even see the player's face. This guy was hiding absolutely everything that he could about himself. And to Diabel's secret amazement and frustration, his Searching skill was not high enough to get through these protections.

This person was unbelievably suspicious and sly. But he was familiar with this type of player. Diabel had seen a few others who had tried to go to such lengths to hide themselves for a multitude of different reasons. And there was one common factor that they seemed to all share.

When you spent all your time hiding away from the world, refusing to stand up and face it on its terms, you were weak. And he didn't even mean that in a bad way. Lots of people were weak. All he really meant by it was that these sorts of players tended to not be suited to combat. Because if they were good at combat, then there was no reason to hide. So he attacked, expecting a quick victory. Few players were able to stand up to him when he got serious, after all. And someone who spent all their time hiding rather than training would be easy to beat.

Since Diabel had been attacked by this player already, he knew that the player's cursor was orange, hidden or not. There was no other way around that. A green player, when they attacked another green player, became orange. That was just how it worked. So when he had been punched that first time, this unknown player's cursor had become orange a moment later. With this in mind, even though Diabel was now going to attack this guy back, he knew that his own cursor would remain green since the system didn't care about what happened to criminals. Green players could kill an orange player if they wanted to and still remain green.

So he would not have to worry about the colour of his cursor changing, even though he had been prepared for that if it meant securing a victory over Illfang. Orange cursors that were given due to a fight that did not result in a death were reverted back to normal anywhere between a few hours and a few days later which wasn't that big of a deal if it meant defeating the boss.

The players needed a win to show everyone who had lost hope that it was still possible to beat the game. So he was willing to go orange for a little while so that he could capture and interrogate this guy.

But it wouldn't be necessary. This player had struck first, so he was the criminal, and there would be no consequences to either him or his new friend Asuna if they decided to fight back.

Diabel lunged forward.

Things went south instantly.

Literally every single expectation he had had about this player's skill level was shattered in an instant. This player was far, far more skilled than Diabel had expected, and so he had had his ass handed to him in about two seconds. Diabel's attacks were countered with ease, and he found himself completely incapable of defending himself against a player that was this strong.

He had massively underestimated the guy, and he internally berated himself for doing so. He had seen a demonstration of this player's capabilities earlier on against that group of minions, where he had done that weird spinning move to kill them all at once. But Diabel had mostly written it off because in most cases, being really good at defeating monsters didn't translate over to being good at PVP encounters.

It was clear now that this player, like Diabel himself, had quite a bit of combat experience against other players, which made him believe that he was fighting against another beta tester.

He could see no other explanation.

* * *

Kirito casually batted away all of Diabel's attacks, knocked him aside, and took the opportunity to leap in front of Asuna as she tried to pass by him and run over towards the boss.

To her credit, she did make an instinctive attempt to defend herself, but it was not even close to enough. Kirito dodged her counterattack, grabbed her arm, and punched her as hard as he could in the stomach, folding her over like a lawn chair. Winded, she was completely unable to avoid the spin kick that struck her in the face a moment later, launching her backwards into a pillar.

Kirito had grown to love his Acrobatics skill. He could do all sorts of crazy spins and kicks with it. The sheer versatility it afforded him was well worth the use of a skill slot.

The girl's rapier dropped right into Kirito's hand as she was sent flying away.

"Asuna!" Diabel shouted in concern.

Diabel found himself impaled an instant later by Asuna's own rapier, as Kirito had whipped it at him, blade first.

"Hrrk―!"

Then he, like Asuna, was spin kicked in the face, launching him backwards into the same pillar that Asuna had just been launched into. Diabel bounced off the concrete wall and landed squarely on top of the girl, knocking her right back to the ground after she had tried to stand up.

"This is the last time I'm going to tell you," Kirito warned. "Leave this room, or I'll make you leave."

Kirito was not playing around anymore. His future was literally at stake here. Whether or not he ever made it out of the game could depend on whether or not he succeeded in soloing Illfang. The way he saw it, these two were getting in the way of him ever seeing his family again. So he was starting to run out of patience.

"B-bastard!" Diabel shouted, as he sat up and collected himself.

"Diabel," a weak, muffled sounding voice called out from under him.

The knight looked down.

Almost all of Diabel's body weight was being supported by his left arm. That just happened to be how he had landed. He was sprawled out on top of the girl almost in a one-handed push-up position. The majority of his weight was being propped up by that single appendage.

Incidentally, this arm was planted directly on the back of Asuna's skull, which was causing all of his weight to firmly plant her face into the stone floor.

He was inadvertently grinding her face into the concrete.

This, naturally, made it extremely difficult for her to speak. And she was even further hampered due to the fact that she was still winded and struggling to catch her breath from the earlier punch to her stomach.

"S-sorry!" He apologized as he frantically got up off of her.

Asuna sat up with a groan.

Diabel lent her his hand to help her stand up.

She ignored it and stood up herself. She took the next few moments to dust herself off, before finally turning to face him.

She looked at him for a few long moments with a frown clear on her face.

She definitely wasn't happy.

"I didn't mean to do that, sorry," Diabel explained after a long moment of silence.

"Good," she replied with a terrifying smile. "Because if you had we'd be fighting right now."

Diabel gulped.

But then Asuna's glare seemed to morph into an expression of concern and surprise.

"Um…" she hummed in confusion upon noticing her weapon sticking out of Diabel's gut.

"What is it?" Diabel asked, seemingly oblivious.

"Your stomach."

"My stomach?"

Asuna pointed down, and Diabel looked.

Asuna's rapier had pierced clean through his body. Diabel's eyes were wide at the sight.

"A-are you okay?" Asuna asked.

"I-I'm fine, I think." Diabel reached down with a shaky hand and grabbed the handle of the rapier. Then he yanked it out with only a wince. "That actually didn't hurt too bad."

"Really?"

"Yeah. My HP is fine too. I'm still good to continue."

"Same. We'll handle him together," she said.

"Are you sure? Fighting a player is a lot different from fighting a monster. And this guy is really good."

"If we work together, we'll be able to handle him," she insisted.

Diabel considered the idea for a few moments but ended up relenting.

"Okay. You go right, I'll go left."

"Right."

The two of them looked up just in time to see the hooded player charging straight toward them.

But their jaws dropped in disbelief at what they saw right behind him. While they had been having their conversation, the hooded player had lured Illfang and all the minions and was now leading them straight toward the two of them, head-on.

* * *

Kirito had switched up his strategy. While the two of them had been distracted, he had decided to take things up a notch. Rather than trying to keep Illfang far away from the conflict, he decided to make use of the boss to try and scare them out of the room.

Kirito had healed the boss enough with his potions that it was no longer in danger of being killed with only a few more hits. So the risk of Illfang being defeated had been reduced by a lot. So Kirito could use the boss to help him out.

Hopefully, they would see that the situation was hopeless now that they no longer had to fight just him, but Illfang and the minions as well at the same time.

At the last moment before reaching the two other stunned players, Kirito radically increased his speed and jumped over them. He landed on the side of the pillar and did a wall-run up towards the top of it. He vaulted himself on top of the horizontal slabs, leaving all the monsters and Illfang himself to attack the two players below.

"God dammit! Are you trying to kill us?!"

Neither of them would actually die here, Kirito would make sure of it. If it looked like they were about to, Kirito had every intention of saving them. But such an intervention probably would not be needed as these two players were definitely skilled enough to survive against these monsters. They probably wouldn't win against them, but they would keep themselves alive until they felt overwhelmed.

Just in case, he pulled out a pair of teleport crystals and considered another idea.

He didn't have very many of them in his inventory, but he had bought a few. And for a couple of moments, he considered whether or not he should toss two of them down to the players.

' _Later,'_ he eventually decided. Once it looked like they were becoming overwhelmed and only if they found themselves unable to retreat. He'd toss the crystals down only then. He didn't want them to just pocket the items and continue fighting like nothing happened since the crystals were so rare.

"Of course not," Kirito replied, reiterating the same point once again. "I just want you to retreat."

"I refuse!" Diabel cried. "Not until Illfang is dead!"

These players definitely knew how to annoy a person.

"Illfang isn't dying today," Kirito declared. "It's about time that you two accepted that."

"You're wrong!" Asuna shouted. "Here's what's actually going to happen, mister! We're going to defeat you, kill the boss, and then make you answer our questions!"

Kirito chuckled again. Because there was no way that that was going to happen. Even if it did look like he was about to be captured, he had teleport crystals on him. He'd have to be paralyzed for them to even stand a chance at succeeding. And even then, his crystals were hotkeyed, specifically for such an occasion. If it looked like he was about to become paralyzed by a weapon or potion, he was gone.

Asuna's entire face went red in fury, after hearing him laughing.

"Stop laughing at me!"

This girl really did not like being laughed at, Kirito noticed. If he ever wanted to get her to slip up during a fight, he could just point and laugh at her.

With this thought in mind, he decided that maybe this moment was the perfect opportunity to give the under-handed tactic a try.

* * *

A few minutes of intense combat went by. Diabel and Asuna continued battling the monsters that had been forced on them, frantically trying to come up with a plan all the while.

"Ugh! This guy is infuriating! He's just watching us struggle down here!"

Asuna chanced a glance up to the top of the pillars where she knew the player was sitting, and couldn't believe what she saw.

There the player was, sitting casually with his legs hanging over the edge, kicking back and forth through the air without a care in the world. There was also a drink in his hand that he was sipping on while he watched her fight.

Her whole body locked up as an indescribable, righteous fury took over her. The reaction was so intense that she completely missed one of the minion's attacks, causing it to slip through her guard and knock her down to the ground.

"Asuna! Keep focused! Just ignore him!"

She regained her footing and stood back up just in time to defend herself from the followup attacks.

"How can I possibly do that when he's just sitting up there watching?! We're fighting for our lives down here and he's just… lounging casually!"

"Man, you guys are so lazy," Kirito called down to them before taking a sip of his drink.

Asuna's fists clenched so hard at that comment that her knuckles went completely white and it felt as if she nearly busted the handle off of her own rapier.

Her rage was so intense that once again, she let her guard down, giving ample opportunity for Illfang to send her flying away with a swing from his giant blade.

"Asuna! I know it's hard, but you have to ignore him! He's trying to make you slip up!"

"Well, it's working!" She exclaimed as she got back up to her feet. "I have never wanted to kill somebody this badly before!"

Kirito chuckled.

Asuna snapped.

"I'm going to rip your throat out and skin you alive with my fingernails!" She shouted up at him.

"That's an image," Kirito commented. "Maybe I'd believe you if you weren't getting your butt kicked by minions."

As if on queue, she was tackled to the ground by two of them, causing her to scream in outrage.

* * *

Kirito's strategy was working wonders. The girl was so easy to rile up. He barely even needed to put any effort into it.

She did not have the ability to hone all of her anger into a sharpened edge and use it as a weapon. Her rage just caused her to become sloppy. So a few well-placed comments was all it took to force both players onto the back foot.

Diabel couldn't fend off all the monsters at once on his own, so when Asuna faltered, so did he. They weren't even able to keep up on their own anymore, and their HP was dropping more and more as time went on.

A few comments were all it took to cause them to start losing. It was incredibly effective.

But this strategy also had its disadvantages.

It made Kirito nervous for one. He wanted them to slip up, but he did not want to be responsible for any player deaths. So despite his casual posture, his eyes were locked onto every single detail in the ensuing battle, and his entire body felt like a compressed spring, ready to fly into action in an instant. If it looked like anyone was about to be killed, he was going to drop down and save them both without hesitation.

In the meantime, however, he was constantly trying to figure out how to get them both to retreat.

Kirito glanced over at the wide-open boss room door.

That was the other disadvantage. The door was still wide open. And it was only a matter of time before another player came by and noticed this battle going on.

Kirito was confident that he could deal with these two players. He had already analyzed and broken down their fighting styles and had rough estimates on their skill levels.

Kirito had suspicions that Diabel was a beta tester going by the surprising level of competency that he had displayed in their brief engagement.

The thing was, PVP was not common in this game now that death was real, and especially since it was still so early on. Duels seemed to happen every now and then, but the PVP scene had been far more active back in the beta. So there were not too many skilled combatants out there yet. Most elected to train against monsters, which on such an early floor as this, were dumb and couldn't really strategize or work together.

For that reason, most players would find themselves outmatched in an actual battle with an intelligent opponent that could strategize. Few other players would be able to duel against someone like Kirito, who had spent a lot of time in the past fighting against other people. He had the experience. Diabel seemed to have it too, but the rapier user did not.

She had a ton of natural talent. It was remarkable to see, actually. Kirito had never seen a new player get so skilled, so quickly. He'd even go so far as to say that she had more natural talent than Kirito himself did. In the distant future, she would be a force of nature.

But right now, all of that potential was just that. Potential. It was dormant, and she did not have the experience to make use of it to its full extent. As a result, in a straight fight, she would be no match for him. She'd probably put up a good fight against someone like Diabel, but she'd probably lose even against him. Diabel was Kirito's biggest threat at the moment. Asuna needed more time to develop her skills before really becoming one herself. Especially since she was so easy to manipulate with a few well-placed comments.

But the point was, even together, Kirito was confident that he could beat them both. But what if another player came by and walked into the room? What if two players did?

Then the results would become far more uncertain.

So even though Kirito looked relaxed at the moment, he was anything but. His plans were still precariously perched on the edge of a razor and all it would take is a single stroke of bad luck to topple them over. He was by no means safe yet.

He needed to find a way to speed things along that didn't involve getting these two killed.

He needed to come up with a plan.

* * *

"We need to come up with a plan!" Asuna shouted

Illfang was no longer only a few hits away from death. It would take several uninterrupted minutes for the two of them to finish it off now, and a coordinated attack.

"I've got an idea!" Diabel declared as he parried one of Illfang's attacks.

"What is it?!"

"I've been watching the boss carefully! Earlier on, do you remember how he was just standing still at the back wall, ignoring us?!"

"Yeah! I noticed that too?! What was up with that?!"

"I have a hunch! When I give the signal, make a break for the far wall! If we get far enough away from the boss, he should leave us alone while we deal with these minions! If we do that, he'll either wander off to the side of the room or even better, he might even go after this other guy!"

Asuna smirked.

"Good! Give that jerk a taste of his own medicine!"

* * *

Kirito frowned, having heard everything.

He took one last sip of his drink before tossing the empty glass to the side, causing it to shatter somewhere off to his right.

He was going to need to jump down now. Break time was over.

* * *

"Ready?!" Diabel asked.

"Yeah!"

"Now!"

The two of them sprinted toward the far wall as fast as they could. They passed outside of Illfang's attack range and the boss immediately stopped chasing after them. Rather than turn around and go after Kirito, however, Illfang started walking towards the back wall.

This confused both of them, at first.

"What the―? Where is it going? Why isn't it going after that other guy?"

"Oh no, you don't!" Diabel shouted. He frantically scanned the environment with Search but revealed nothing.

Asuna picked up on the fact that the hooded player was missing a moment later.

"What the―?! Where did he go?!"

"He's gone invisible again! Coward! Come out and face us!"

"This guy makes me want to rip my hair out!" Asuna shouted. "Just like that stupid Rat!"

Kirito raised his brow from his hiding spot after hearing the familiar moniker. Evidently, this girl had met Argo at some point and had been graced with Argo's Argo-ness.

Kirito grinned, thankful that he had not been the only person that had been targeted by the info dealer in the past. The rapier user had also been. He started to wonder about what the story there, was. He'd bet it was funny.

Just as Asuna finished complaining about her 'friend', they got swarmed by the minions again, forcing them into yet another tedious battle.

"I hate these things so much!" The girl raged.

"Asuna! Do you think you can hold them off for a few seconds on your own?! I need to break this guy's camouflage again!"

"Leave it to me! Drag him out here!"

Diabel ran away from the group of minions, leaving Asuna to fend them all off on her own. He quickly started scanning the room.

"Where the hell did you go?!" He took a considering glance around the room and quickly found the only possible place that a player could hide. Behind one of the pillars. He ran around the room and looked behind each one as quickly as he could. Eventually, he got lucky. His interface gave him a pinging noise, and he grinned.

Kirito's camouflage shattered a moment later.

Diabel smirked.

* * *

"You guys are really annoying," Kirito complained as his camouflage went down, irritation clear in his voice.

"I don't want to hear that from you!" Asuna shouted back at him from the opposite side of the room, having overheard the comment despite the distance between them.

"There's nowhere to hide in this room, buddy!" Diabel pointed out. "You might have given me some trouble if there were any shadowy corners to cower in, but you're stuck here out in the open with no cover! I hope you enjoy fighting minions as much as we do! Because you're about to get a whole lot of them!"

Kirito looked to the side just in time to see Asuna run by him with all the minions trailing behind her.

Kirito looked back at Diabel and saw him running away.

Kirito was now the closest target, so all the minions turned and went after him.

"Asuna! Now's our chance!"

"Right!"

The two players charged over towards Illfang while Kirito was distracted.

* * *

Kirito could have ended the fight with the minions almost immediately, but a new plan formed in his mind, and he stayed his hand.

Illfang was near the entrance to the room. So Kirito allowed the two players to run towards the boss because they were now doing most of the work in getting towards the open door. This would potentially give Kirito the opportunity to toss them both outside and lock them out with the switch. So he watched the two players out of the corner of his eye as they started battling the boss again, and he felt a surge of excitement as their battle immediately started to drift closer to the door.

Now was his chance.

He spun, annihilating all the minions, and activated Hide.

* * *

Diabel and Asuna tried to kill Illfang as quickly as possible. Without having to deal with the minions, and with all of their previous experience working together, they found themselves immediately on a roll. Illfang's HP started plummeting. They switched back and forth seamlessly, and Illfang didn't stand a chance.

They got him down to about 2% when everything went wrong again.

Something struck Asuna from behind, and she was launched over towards the door.

"Asuna!" Diabel shouted after her in concern. But he could not go after her due to Illfang bearing down on him. He could do nothing to help and needed to exert all his effort into just staying alive.

Asuna landed and tumbled across the stone floor.

She managed to stop her momentum relatively quickly, however, and landed in a crouch.

She turned around just in time to get a boot to the face, knocking her right back down to the ground. She was nailed in the stomach, winding her once again, and was sent flying backwards as if she were a soccer ball. She landed and started rolling again.

This time, she wasn't even given the chance to breathe as she felt herself get kicked yet again before she had even stopped rolling.

The unknown player was on her again in an instant, not giving her any time to collect herself.

She tried to put her hand on the ground to stabilize herself so that she could stand up, but it was immediately kicked out from under her causing her to collapse onto her face. Then she felt a hand grab her by her hair, and start to violently drag her across the floor.

Asuna immediately reached up to grab at the offending hand to try and get the player to release her.

Her head was yanked to the side and she was backhanded across the face for her efforts, completely stunning her and making her see stars. Kirito pulled her hair harder and finally used it as a handle to drag her outside the room.

* * *

Kirito dragged her, kicking and screaming, all the way out of the boss room and into the labyrinth outside, picking up her rapier along the way with his other hand and looping it through his belt.

She was shouting expletives at him the whole time, but Kirito had mostly tuned her out as he focused on his destination.

Since he was only one person, there was no way to drag out both players simultaneously. So he was forced to do so one at a time.

There wasn't really any particular reason why he had chosen Asuna as his first target. She had simply been the closest to the door. If Diabel had been there instead, then Kirito would be dragging his ass across the floor at that moment instead.

"You jerk!" Asuna shouted, continuing her long-winded rant. "The second you let me go I'm gonna―!"

Kirito bitchslapped her.

"Shut up," Kirito replied. "Nobody cares."

He had had just about enough of her yelling, and it was giving him a headache.

Asuna gasped in astonishment at the rough treatment. Nobody had ever done anything like this to her before, so she had no idea how to respond to it.

"Wha―?! How dare you?!"

Kirito yanked her hair again, throwing her off her balance. She let out this adorable, cute-sounding cry that made Kirito feel like he had just kicked a puppy, but it wasn't enough to make him stop.

It helped a lot that this was a virtual world. As it was, there were pretty much no consequences to beating the crap out of someone. There were pain limiters, there was no such thing as permanent injuries, and players would recover from anything in less than an hour provided their HP was above 0. That was all that mattered. So the way Kirito saw it, he could be doing much, much worse to this girl than he currently was and still have a clean conscience. If anything, he was being polite.

The rules that applied in the real world just didn't apply here. It was the most PG-13 concept that he had ever seen. All the violence had been stripped from violence, reducing any physical confrontation to, essentially, the equivalent of a pillow fight.

With complete control over her head, the girl could do almost nothing to resist what Kirito was doing to her.

She definitely tried doing _something_ , but every time that she struggled, Kirito would yank her hair again, and kick her feet out from under her, putting her again at his mercy.

If she had had some time to think and strategize, there might have been a way for her to figure out a way to get out from under his iron grip, but she had never considered being placed in a situation like this one before. Where her own hair was being used to restrict her movements. So no obvious solutions appeared in her mind.

Kirito himself could think of a few options that she could have tried. If she could manage to get her menu open, she would easily be able to summon her rapier back to her hands and cause some problems that way. But this was an option that was not usually obvious to newer players, especially in the heat of the moment like this, so there was a pretty good chance that she wouldn't think of it. Even if she did, Kirito had countermeasures ready, but they weren't needed.

Because she didn't think of it.

She also couldn't get her feet under her to support her weight, so she had no control over where they were headed. She was being dragged in much the same way that a giant bag of flour would be. She was mostly sprawled out on the ground facing backwards in a weird sort of crab-walk, struggling to get her feet under her. So she couldn't see what was in front of them since her gaze was fixed in the opposite direction.

It also didn't help that she only had about twenty seconds or so to act. That covered the whole period of time in which Kirito had dragged her all the way to his intended destination.

It just wasn't enough time for her to think of anything.

Asuna managed to crane her neck around and spotted a massive staircase in front of them.

The boss room was located at the top of a huge set of stairs that took several minutes to climb. She had just been dragged right to the top of them.

Her eyes widened as the other player's plan for her immediately became apparent.

"Let go of me right now you ass!" She desperately exclaimed, more than a little afraid at what she believed was about to happen.

Kirito didn't reply. Instead, he roughly dragged her up to her feet and picked her up in his arms. He lifted her completely off her feet and suspended her high above his head in a cheesy imitation of some sort of wrestling move.

Asuna's heart sank at the sight before her. Suspended high into the air, completely powerless, looking down a seemingly endless flight of stairs.

She was terrified.

"Don't you dare―!"

Kirito chucked her down the staircase.

Asuna screamed.

* * *

Kirito had put in a ton of thought into how he could get these two players to leave the room. Unfortunately, however, he couldn't seem to find any magic bullet solutions.

Force the girl to teleport somehow? Wouldn't work. If he pinned this girl down and tried to get her to use a teleport crystal she could just refuse and that would be it. There was no way to teleport another player by force against their will. It had to be voluntary. All he could do is provide her with the crystal.

Force feed her a paralysis potion? She would struggle mightily to resist, but it could end up working in the end. It would not be easy, though. It would be a messy situation that would involve him having to rough her up an uncomfortable amount, in advance. It served as a decent backup option, however.

Instead, he selected his third option. Drag her to the staircase leading to the boss room and toss her down it. This would buy him at least a couple of minutes of time before she came back. Enough time for him to deal with the other player.

He had also wanted to see this girl get thrown down a flight of stairs ever since he had first met her back when she had been launching kobolds around. So this plan had the added bonus of being the funniest idea he had had as well.

So he picked it.

He watched her tumble down the stairs for a few moments and let out a chuckle at the sight. It was easily one of the highlights of his day so far, so he took a moment or two to enjoy it before finally getting back to business.

Just before turning back around to head back to the boss room, he pulled out the girl's rapier and tossed it down the stairs after her.

* * *

Asuna's heart dropped into her stomach at the sudden feeling of weightlessness and she tried to get her body to move to brace herself for the impact. But it wasn't enough to stop her momentum.

Her surroundings quickly spiralled out of control.

Immediately, she picked up speed as she started tumbling down the massive staircase. She went faster and faster until she couldn't make out what was going on anymore. Everything in her field of vision was just spinning uncontrollably as she continued falling down the stairs.

At some point she face-planted on one of the stone steps, causing a massive force to reverberate through her skull. It concussed her, causing her ears to ring. After that, she lost all sense of direction.

For some time afterwards, it felt like she was being beaten up from all directions. It was totally disorienting and she couldn't follow any of it.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she finally came to an abrupt stop at the bottom of the staircase.

A few moments later, her rapier came clattering down the stairs behind her. It bounced a few more times and came to a stop about ten meters away from her.

Almost a full minute passed by before her ears finally stopped ringing, and her mind finally rebooted.

The first thought that went through her head once it was clear was that she was absolutely amazed at how little pain she was in, relatively speaking. If any of what she had just gone through had happened in the real world, there was no doubt at all that she would be dead right now. It still hurt a bit, but the pain was mostly just annoying, rather than debilitating.

She was absolutely and completely fine. She had felt almost nothing throughout that entire ordeal. It had been terrifying as it had played out, and her senses had been so warped by it that she hadn't been able to follow what happened with any clarity, but like a small child who cried endlessly before getting a shot and who ended up being confused afterward about how easy it turned out to be in the end, she came to the realization that her fear had been a massive overreaction.

Her current body was way more durable than she had ever imagined.

So that was her first thought. Amazement and astonishment at how strong she was in this new world.

The second thought that came to her mind quickly took over, though, leaving all others forgotten.

Rage.

It wasn't really a specific thought, actually. It was more like the sun had just risen inside her head and was looking for any possible excuse to incinerate everything. It was an all-encompassing, blindingly bright rage that completely consumed her mind.

Now that she wasn't afraid anymore, her fury had now taken a front-row seat.

Because she had just been absolutely _manhandled._ It didn't matter that it hadn't hurt that much. She had been _manhandled!_ Her! She had had her hair tugged, had been beaten and thrown around, bitchslapped multiple times _,_ punched, kicked, and had been thrown down a staircase, all by the most infuriating player she had ever met, like a used up piece of garbage.

Told to shut up and that everything she had to say was worthless.

It made her furious! And it was made all the worse by the fact that she knew, with near certainty, that he was laughing at her at that very moment.

Good lord did she hate that laugh of his. It nearly sent her over the edge every time she heard it.

Never before had she been this mad. She literally saw red.

So she wasted no time in picking up her rapier and racing back up the staircase, hellbent on getting revenge.

* * *

With one player dealt with, and only a passing thought about how he regretted not having had the opportunity to film that girl tumbling down those stairs, as his camera was still recording inside the boss room, Kirito immediately focused on his next target.

The blue-haired player.

* * *

Diabel had been unable to do anything to help his temporary partner as he had needed to single-handedly fend off all the minions, and the boss himself, all at once. Even if he had wanted to, he wouldn't have been able to do it since every spare moment of his time was spent trying to keep himself alive.

At least, that was what he told himself.

It was a lie though, and he knew it. He could have helped her if he had followed them outside the room. But if he had done that, the doors would have been closed, and Illfang would have instantly regenerated his HP back up to 100%. As a beta tester, he knew how that all worked.

He chose not to do it.

It had easily been the hardest decision he had ever made in his life. Despite everything this hooded player had said about not wanting to kill either of them, he easily could have killed that girl while Diabel stood by and chose to do nothing.

He had been forced to choose between two impossible scenarios. Try to save the girl and let Illfang regenerate, or keep Illfang from regenerating back to full health and leave his partner to her fate.

Illfang was so close to death. Only a minute or two more and it would all be over. He even had a realistic shot of finishing it off himself now. All he'd need is a little breathing room from the minions. If Asuna came back, it would be their victory if they could just launch one last assault.

Ultimately, that was his decision. Diabel had recounted and tallied up all the countless opportunities in which the hooded player could have killed either one of them if he had really wanted to, but didn't, and took a leap of faith. This player, as suspicious as he was, truly didn't seem to want them to die. He wanted them to fail to kill Illfang but did not want to kill them directly to do it.

So Diabel was able to deduce the player's plan. He intended to drag them both outside the room and close the door to cause the boss to fully heal in an instant. If that happened, even if Asuna came back at that point, Illfang simply would have way too much health to take down with just the two of them alone. They would tire themselves out long before finishing it off.

So the best option, with all of this in mind, was to stay put, and trust in the fact that the hooded player wouldn't kill that girl no matter how much he wanted to make it look like he would, and in the meantime, get Illfang away from the boss door to prevent being dragged out of the room himself when the player inevitably came back inside.

The idea was to at least buy enough time for the girl to recover and to come back inside. To succeed at that, he was going to need to avoid being dragged out of the room himself for as long as possible.

Diabel immediately grimaced upon noticing the player walk back inside the room, without Asuna in tow.

"Are you going to leave peacefully or not?" The hooded player asked.

Diabel didn't say anything at first as he continued the battle. He wanted to stall for as much time as possible so he tried to steer the conversation in another direction.

"Is Asuna still alive?" He asked as he deflected a mace from one of the minions.

Diabel knew the answer already but wanted to waste as much of this guy's time as possible.

"I see that you wish to be dragged out," The unknown player replied, not falling for it. "Fair enough." Then he drew his sword and sprinted toward him.

Diabel turned and ran without hesitation. He tried to make a beeline toward Illfang's throne, trying to get as far away from the door as possible. Unfortunately, however, after only a half a dozen steps or so, he suddenly slipped on something.

Stunned, he looked down as he collapsed to the floor and noticed a shield. Illfang's shield.

He turned back towards the hooded player and saw his outstretched hand.

Diabel's jaw dropped in amazement at the sight. Putting aside everything that had happened, the sheer accuracy that had been required to throw a shield of that size right under his feet as he was running, stunned him.

He looked up just in time to see Illfang's fist. Diabel was punched, and by total coincidence, flew right back towards the hooded player.

Taking the unexpected opportunity, and displaying remarkable timing, Kirito leaped into the air, and kicked the flying Diabel, redirecting his momentum just enough to send him over towards the door.

Diabel landed, and in desperation, tried to frantically cling onto anything within his reach in order to stop the other player from successfully extricating him from the room.

But he, like Asuna, was given no chance to collect himself.

A brief, chaotic struggle ensued as the hooded player ripped the minions apart without even slowing down as he sprinted towards him.

The player was on him in an instant. Diabel tried to get his sword up to defend himself, but the player knocked it out of his hand and kicked him back to the ground. From that point forward, it was all downhill.

He was winded, kicked, and forcibly dragged outside the room in a remarkable display of skill on the other player's part. This hooded player fended off all the minions, the boss, and Diabel himself, all at once, and was still able to drag him towards the door.

He knew at that moment that this hooded player, whoever he was, was without a doubt one of the strongest players in the game.

Diabel was tossed outside in a heap.

He turned and saw out of the corner of his eye the blue light of a sword skill activating.

He caught a single glimpse of the cloaked player spinning unbelievably quickly through the air towards him. The player landed, planted his foot, and struck him in the side with a roundhouse kick.

It had been a blur. Never before had he been hit as hard as that. He didn't even know it was possible to kick anything that hard in this game. Diabel left the ground and flew straight across the entire length of the new room he found himself in. He didn't hit the ground again until he had travelled well over thirty meters.

He landed on his back, and then bounced, travelling even further out.

While he was tumbling, he caught a few glimpses of the open boss room door as it receded, and saw the cloaked player immediately try to rush back inside. All the while he flew further and further away.

It seemed to happen in slow motion.

All the player would have to do is close that door, and everything would be over just like that. Having all the players leave the room was not enough. The doors had to be closed in addition to this. But there was nothing more that he could do to stop the player from closing them.

The door got smaller and smaller as he frantically tried to stop himself.

But it was no use. He was moving too fast.

It was over.

The revelation felt like it had crushed his soul. They had been so close.

It was all over.

Diabel closed his eyes in disappointment as he gave up.

* * *

**A few minutes earlier**

Agil started to worry about that girl after she had not returned. He had figured that she'd come back as soon as she realized that the boss was back to full strength.

However, she hadn't. And that made him start to wonder if she really had done something stupid like run inside and try to solo the boss. So after making sure the rest of the failed raid party were all back up to full strength, he set out after her.

He didn't want to waste any time, so he ran at a moderate clip.

He spent the next several minutes retracing his steps all the way back to the stairs leading up to the boss room.

He made it back to the room with the staircase in it just in time to see the very girl he was looking for pick herself up from the base of the steps for some reason, pick up her rapier and take off back up the stairs.

He would have called after her, but he hesitated, having forgotten what her name was. He had actually never even learned it, having only said a few passing comments to her over the day or so since they had met. So instead, he simply raced after her.

He found himself about halfway up the stairs, a moment away from telling her to wait up, when something extraordinary that he had not expected to happen, happened.

Just as the rapier user climbed over the last step, Agil watched as Diabel himself, the thought-to-be-dead leader of the raid group, flew through the air and rammed into the girl at an extremely high speed, blowing her over like a bowling pin.

The hit was extraordinary. It reminded Agil of what it would look like to watch a fully grown, top-tier NFL athlete, in full gear, using his full strength with nothing held back to smash into and utterly destroy a kindergartener with a tackle.

The girl went from a running position to having the back of her neck striking the concrete floor in about a quarter of a second in the mother of all clotheslines. She smashed off the top step of the staircase and bounced, rocketing backwards and flipping uncontrollably like a rag doll.

She had absorbed all of Diabel's momentum unexpectedly, and sailed backwards and back down the stairs, making it almost a quarter way down the entire flight before actually making contact with the steps themselves. She landed on her back and had no hope whatsoever of stopping herself as she once again rapidly tumbled down the staircase, far faster and more violently than the previous time.

Agil tried to catch her. He really did. But it had nearly been impossible to succeed. Catching someone as they rapidly somersaulted, head over heels, down a flight of stairs proved too difficult a task for him. To his credit, he nearly managed to catch her leg, but his attempt to grab her as she went flying passed him failed and her calf bounced off the back of his hand.

The girl continued, unimpeded, down every single remaining step throughout the rest of the staircase.

There were hundreds of them.

* * *

Diabel thanked all the gods that he could think of that something had managed to break his fall at the last moment. He had very nearly fallen down a staircase. Could you imagine that? Him! Falling down the stairs! It would have been super embarrassing! Only a loser would do that! But moreover, it would have guaranteed that this unknown player would succeed in his plans, whatever they were.

He was back in the game! There was still hope!

He had no idea what had broken his fall, as when he turned around, there was nothing there, but he didn't care either. Whatever had stopped him, had given him the chance to turn everything around. So he did not waste the opportunity. He got up and raced back over towards the door.

The hooded player in front of him was in the process of closing it. Diabel could see the golden light emanating from inside the boss room slowly start to recede as the doors closed. The gap between the two sides of the door narrowed more and more.

With every step, Diabel wondered whether or not he would make it there in time. He was moving as quickly as he could, but it looked like he wasn't going to. It was going to be really close.

Thankfully, the boss door seemed like it was extremely heavy. It was not easy to manipulate either open or closed, so the hooded player was having a moderately difficult time with it on his own.

Ultimately, the thing that ended up deciding the victor in this race was one single detail. The boss door opened inwards. When standing outside the boss room, a player had to push on the door to get it to open, not pull. If it had been the other way around, Diabel would not have made it in time. But as it was, Diabel could throw his weight at the door as it was closing to keep it from shutting all the way, something that would not have been possible otherwise.

The cloaked player was only a hair away from closing it when Diabel struck.

Since all of his attempts to use a sword against this player had failed miserably so far, Diabel decided to simply throw himself at him, tackling him and sending both of them sprawling back into the boss room and forcing the door back open.

He landed on top of the player and grabbed him by the fabric of his cloak.

"Not happening!" He shouted in his face, victorious. "I won't let you―"

Diabel was headbutted by the player, causing him to fail to say what he had wanted to.

Diabel tried to punch the player under him, but Kirito leaned his head to the side, causing him to punch the ground with his fist instead, an action that would have destroyed his hand had this not been a virtual world.

Kirito twisted around so he was on his knees, and stood up, causing Diabel to tumble off of him onto the ground.

Then both players summoned their respective weapons to their hands and began a short but intense duel.

Since everyone had left the room for a few moments, all the minions and Illfang himself had made their way over to the far side of the room in the meantime. The room was still active, however, and Illfang's HP remained a hair away from 0. They were just far away now, giving Diabel a chance to finally have some breathing room to do battle with this hooded player without any interruptions from the minions.

Since they were battling inside the doorway itself, they were on the cusp of the room and so the minions did not begin to approach them. And neither did Illfang. The two players were outside of all the monsters' attack ranges, allowing both of them to focus entirely on the duel between them.

Diabel brought every single ounce of experience and skill forward in this fight. His morale was at its height, and everything depended on him. He was the last one standing between this hooded player, and whatever dastardly machinations he had planned, coming to fruition.

He could not afford to lose! Everything was depending on him, now! He was the last hope!

* * *

Agil ended up torn after watching the girl fall down all of those stairs like that. He had to decide whether to go check up on her now or go and see Diabel, the player he had previously believed to have been killed. He ultimately chose the latter after noticing that the girl's HP gauge was still above 50%, so she was alright. And besides, Agil expected her to run up to the top of the stairs again anyway, so he'd meet up with her then.

So he continued towards the top and widened his eyes in surprise as he saw Diabel battling it out with a cloaked player that he had never seen before. The battle was vicious, too, and his immediate thought was that this unknown player was trying to PK the raid leader.

Agil immediately rushed over towards the battle in order to help out.

* * *

Kirito got the upper hand after letting go of his sword in the middle of the fight and punching Diabel in the face with the newly freed hand.

It was such a bizarre maneuver. But for some reason, it kept on catching everyone he used it on by surprise, so it became one of Kirito's go-to's.

Kirito then re-caught his dropped sword in his opposite hand before it hit the ground, and slashed the other player across the chest with it. This created the opportunity that he needed to kick Diabel clear out of the room once again and finally end this farce of a situation for good.

"No!" Diabel shouted as Kirito immediately started closing the doors once again.

Diabel, in desperation, threw his Anneal Blade at the player. This forced Kirito to stop for a brief moment to deflect the attack.

It only held him up for a single second.

But that one second was enough. Because just as Kirito was about to finally slam the door shut for good, Agil arrived.

Kirito was forced to block the incoming axe. But the swing was too strong, and it blew him back into the room. Agil immediately rushed in after him.

* * *

Diabel was in tears. The single most beautiful sight that he had ever seen in his life had presented itself to him.

"Agil, you absolute fucking _hero_!" The man had literally just saved the day single-handedly!

"What's going on here?!" Agil shouted.

"Illfang is on his last legs!" Diabel replied. "If the three of us work together, we can still win! But this guy showed up and stopped us! He even started healing the boss!"

"What?! Why?!"

"I don't know! It doesn't matter though! Help us hold him off, and we'll interrogate him later!"

* * *

Kirito was livid.

He had been a hair too slow. A fucking hair! Then like a bunch of anime heroes in the most cliched way imaginable, they had managed to come back from the brink and foil his plans!

He was pissed! And to top it all off, Agil was here now. Which made it impossible for him to speak anymore. If he said anything, his voice might be recognized from all the times he had spoken to Agil in the past in his shop during those meetings with Timely.

Thankfully, however, Kirito's cloaks that he used when in combat were different in appearance than the ones he had used when he had spoken with Agil earlier. He was also not the only player in the game who made use of the Mask ability. So the fact that his face was blacked out was not an uncommon sight in the game. Agil would not see this ability and identify him as the merchant that always hid his face since so many other cloaked players did the same thing.

If it had been an identifiable ability, Kirito never would have used it.

Kirito's appearance was different enough in that moment that the thought that he and that merchant that Agil routinely made deals were secretly the same wouldn't even cross the man's mind. If Kirito decided to speak, however, that would undoubtedly change. So his identity was still safe.

He had been so close to ending this only for the chance to slip away. If he had just been a little faster, he would have succeeded in kicking everyone else out of the room. Now the potential existed for him to have to fight three players at once now, instead of just two.

He couldn't shake the feeling that he might have just lost his last chance to succeed.

He didn't plan on giving up, however. Not yet. But he was really starting to consider pulling out his second sword and showing these people the true difference between their skill levels.

But he still wanted to keep that capability a secret. It was another tough choice. If he drew his other sword and started fighting with it now, he'd almost certainly win. It'd be tough, but he could do it. But then everyone would be able to identify him by that in the future. In the future, whenever he decided to dual wield, other players would say: 'Hey! That hooded guy with the two swords is the same hooded guy from that crazy shitshow that happened in the boss room on floor 1! Let's get him!' Or some nonsense along those lines.

Maybe that wasn't so bad, though. Kirito didn't know what the best move was at that moment. But in general, he did not like giving away his abilities if he didn't have to, and did not like drawing attention to himself. He could still win with only one sword. In fact, using two would make things much more dangerous since most of the techniques he had developed with them were far more lethal which made it much harder to pull his punches.

So he tentatively decided to stick with just one for now, and he decided to see how the situation developed before going all out like that. To these people, he was still just some random, hooded player who was at the higher end of the spectrum of skill. He could be a lot of different people. So these players had no way to narrow down exactly who he was yet. His identity was still safe, as a result.

He could be anyone, so he did not want to give them more information than necessary to help these players in the investigation that would no doubt unfold after this conflict was over.

In the meantime, he frantically started trying to come up with a workable plan.

Kirito turned around and noticed that the minions were making their way over now that they were a decent distance inside the room once again.

Illfang remained at the back wall, however, still glitched out.

* * *

As the first wave of minions arrived they split up into three groups to go after the three different players. Agil, Diabel, and Kirito put up a unified front.

All but one of the kobolds were dead in seconds, as a result. Agil's axe had sent the last one flying some distance away. It was still alive, but it was hardly a threat on its own to anyone there.

"And who are you supposed to be?" Agil asked the hooded player, after lowering his axe.

Kirito said nothing.

"Not going to talk? Come on man, it's two on one."

"Three."

Diabel and Agil looked back just in time to see Asuna slowly stalk back into the room.

Her hair was shadowing her eyes, and she looked like a wild animal. Drool was leaking out of her mouth, and everybody could feel the sheer aura of rage that was oozing off of her.

She was dragging her rapier across the ground as one would expect a caveman to drag a giant club. The tip was sparking as it bounced across the stone floor.

"Holy shit! What happened to you?!" Diabel shouted in panic, seeing the disturbing sight. He had expected her to be a little roughed up from her earlier beating, but this was something else. She was a complete trainwreck! Her hair was blown wildly all over the place and sticking straight up, looking like she had just been inside a wind-tunnel! Or a hurricane!

Diabel had no explanation for any of it. The other player must have done a number on her!

Asuna didn't respond at first, more than a little pissed off at the player that had just spoken. She kept her gaze fixed on the ground in front of her. Her whole body was trembling as she tried to take deep breaths. She was so unbelievably furious at that moment that she found it difficult to breathe properly.

The last remaining nearby minion thought that that was an opportunity. It tried to get a cheap shot in on the girl while she wasn't looking.

But Asuna had had just about enough of that happening to her. So she intercepted the strike with her free hand. She caught it by the handle without taking her eyes off the floor of the room. Then she twisted and snapped the creature's wrist, causing the weapon to clatter across the room and the kobold to grunt in pain.

"What happened to me?" She repeated in a dark, vicious tone. "I wonder? What happened to me?"

She snaked her arm around the minion's neck and pulled it down into a lock, trapping the creature's head at her hip, under her arm.

It was all happening automatically and she wasn't even looking at what she was doing.

Then she reached up with her other hand, grabbing the creature by the back of the neck and twisting.

She snapped its neck with her bare hands and then ripped its head off.

What was left of the creature shattered into polygons a moment later.

Asuna glared at Diabel.

"Hm?! I wonder?!" She shouted sarcastically and hysterically, so far beyond rage that Diabel had even asked her that question.

"Dude," Agil whispered to the terrified man next to him. "You knocked her down the stairs."

"What?! No, I didn't!" He instantly denied.

"You definitely did. I saw it."

"Wait so the thing that stopped my fall was―"

"Yeah."

"Oh."

Diabel looked back into the furious, gleaming eyes of the girl bearing down on him.

"Okay, okay, okay! H-hold on a second! T-to be fair, I didn't do it on purpose!" He frantically tried to explain. "It was this guy!" He immediately pointed at the masked Kirito. "He was the one that launched me into you!"

"Is that so?" Asuna asked, a single crazed eye peeking through her bangs, and glaring at Kirito.

"You did that too? You beat me, and threw me down those stairs twice?"

"You fell down those stairs twice?" Agil asked, astonished at the absurdity of the claim. It suddenly made sense to him why the girl had been at the bottom of the stairs when he had seen her back then. He must have just missed it when it had happened the first time.

"Yes," she confirmed in a deceptively calm voice.

There were a few moments of intense silence.

Then Kirito chuckled.

He couldn't help it. As pissed off as he was, that story was just hilarious. She had fallen down the stairs two times, back-to-back, in rapid succession? Kirito was kicking himself now for not having had his camera on him at the time, and for not staying outside the room to see it.

He could only imagine how funny that must have been.

* * *

In the future when Asuna looked back on that moment, she would never be able to completely remember what happened next, or how.

At first, after hearing the hooded player start to laugh at her misfortune yet again, she joined in. The other two players tentatively joined them as well, and everyone seemed to be united for a few moments by the entertainment supplied by Asuna's repeated tumbles down the staircase.

They all shared a good chuckle.

Obviously, however, Asuna didn't find it funny in the least. She was the only one that didn't. But something fundamental had just shattered inside her at that moment and it wouldn't be repaired again for some time. Her laughter had simply slipped out as some sort of strange coping mechanism for whatever process had broken down inside her head.

What started as a laugh turned into a strange mix between a wail and a scream.

Agil and Diabel stopped laughing after that, more than a little disturbed at the blood-curdling sound.

But the hooded player did not.

He kept on laughing.

Upon seeing this, Asuna's mind fogged up completely.

The next thing she knew there was a minion in her hands and she was swinging it around over her head and screaming. She launched it with every last fibre of strength contained within her body at the player that bore full responsibility for all of her recent problems.

The hooded player.

Then her rapier was in her hands and she was trying to kill the guy.

On three separate occasions over the previous hour, she had thought that she had reached the ceiling for how mad it was possible for her to get.

She had been wrong every time.

This time it was real, though. She was sure. She could feel it, and she knew. This hooded player had pushed her, single-handedly, all the way up to the summit.

She had reached peak rage.

* * *

**AN: Have a Nice Day!**

**Improvements:**

**Slimicee, Kallum C,**


	19. The Raid Part II

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito stopped laughing.

His eyebrows were in his hairline as he watched the rapier user pick up a minion and start swinging it around over her head. He had never seen anything like it before and didn't know how to react.

When the girl screamed and launched the kobold his way, all he could do was sidestep it. The creature slammed into the ground and skipped like a stone across the water before bouncing some distance away.

Kirito wasn't really able to tell what happened with it after that because he had to put his guard up in order to block the girl's immediate vicious followup assault.

He was placed entirely on the back foot as he defended against her attacks.

* * *

Kirito had goosebumps.

Never in his life had he seen someone so mad before, and all of that anger was directed squarely at him. The girl was screaming and shouting at him and doing everything in her power to try and utterly destroy him.

It was deeply unsettling, to say the least.

She had just gone completely off.

There was a sinking feeling in Kirito's stomach now that he couldn't get rid of no matter what he tried. He felt intimidated. Afraid, even, at such a display of hostility.

...And that pissed him off more than he would have liked to admit. Because he knew that there was no actual reason to feel like that.

As he continued to deflect another series of her attacks, he confirmed that she really didn't seem to know what she was doing. She was acting like a mindless berserker and was just swinging her rapier as hard and as fast as she could, hoping to land some sort of big hit. Kirito understood, logically, how to defend against something like that, but he wasn't able to do it effectively with the gigantic rock currently sitting in his stomach.

He was letting this happen when he knew that he had the skill to stop it. There was a psychological barrier stopping him and he needed to calm down in order to get rid of it.

' _Breathe. Calm down. You're better than this.'_

Kirito exhaled and tried to visualize the girl as nothing more than a monster with a rage mechanic. He didn't really know how to properly deal with angry people like this, so stepping back and imagining the girl as a computer-controlled NPC was the only way in which he could move forward.

It didn't matter how pissed off she was at him, Kirito needed to ignore it and move on.

It took multiple tries. But, eventually, after the third or fourth attempt to forcefully clear his mind, Kirito's surroundings seemed to slow down and he felt himself enter that heightened, hyperaware state that he always fell into whenever he was at his best.

Only then was he able to counterattack.

* * *

With his mind clear, Kirito observed each and every move that the girl made, remaining entirely on the defensive while analyzing her attack patterns.

It didn't take long for him to figure out that like this, she was completely incapable of planning out her moves in advance.

Normally, when you were in the middle of PvP combat at the highest levels, you had to constantly try and read where the battle would be a few moves in the future. If you didn't do this, you risked using a sword skill at the wrong time and becoming stuck in cooldown at the wrong moment. Your opponent could easily exploit that.

You couldn't just dish out sword skills randomly and react to whatever your opponent was doing right at that moment. You had to try to anticipate their future actions and there was a huge amount of strategy involved.

The best PvPers in the game constantly laid traps for each other. They would try to lure you into attacking when you shouldn't in order to force you into cooldown, all the while you would be trying your best to avoid falling for it.

It was a constant back and forth. There was an entirely separate battle going on inside the heads of two duelling players. It involved constantly trying to force their opponents into these sorts of situations. There were moves and countermoves, each trying to get the other to make a mistake.

You needed to have a lot of experience in order to PvP effectively at such a high level, but Kirito was among the few who had it.

This girl he was fighting didn't. She was running entirely on anger, and would not notice anything more subtle than a direct attack.

Feints, subtle footwork, timing manipulation… really any sort of advanced concept at all would be completely missed by her when she was like this, which would allow him to begin to pick her apart.

Kirito subtly changed his stance and presented a false weakness.

He allowed the rapier user to _blast_ his sword out from between them, deliberately leaving his side completely exposed in the process.

Asuna, predictably, went for the opening without hesitation. She thought that she had created it, after all.

But she wasn't thinking ahead.

Kirito turned with the momentum and toe punted the side of Asuna's leg just as she planted it on the ground and activated a Linear.

Kirito had timed it precisely so that her sword skill had still activated. However, due to the kick, her leg had landed slightly to the right of where she had intended it to, and so her aim was off. Since she was unable to correct for that while the skill was running its course, her rapier missed its mark. It whizzed right past Kirito's left side, leaving the girl wide open.

There was no way that any experienced duellist would have fallen for something like that.

Kirito punished that mistake hard.

He would have cut her clean in half at the waist with his counterattack if it had taken place in the real world. Here, however, his blade went straight through her avatar and out the other side leaving her body intact.

It was possible to chop off the limbs of another player, but that mechanic was restricted to only the arms and legs. Decapitations and bisections of the torso didn't actually cause the body to be split into multiple pieces.

So here, instead of seeing everything above her navel fall to the floor and her whole body fall apart into two pieces, he instead saw a huge orange gash form across her stomach, marking where the edge of his blade had sliced through her body. A corresponding gash appeared across her back, marking the exit wound.

It did a devastating amount of damage, knocking out over half of her remaining HP and putting her in the deep yellow section of her HP bar―the portion in between the bright yellow and the red zones.

Kirito had needed to put in a significant amount of mental calculation in order to figure out that an attack of that magnitude would still leave her alive, but he had plenty of experience with his weapon and had a really good understanding of just how much damage each of his attacks did.

So he had known in advance that she would survive.

Asuna didn't even seem to notice the massive drop in her HP, however. She recovered in an instant and came right back at him at full force.

Kirito's right eye twitched.

He knew that he would not be able to land another massive hit like that last one again without killing the girl outright, so he knew that he would have to be far more careful from then on. He had hoped that an attack like that would be enough to get her to back down, but it definitely had not. In fact, it seemed to have had the opposite effect.

She was even more serious now.

Another series of the girl's attacks were all deflected.

Kirito laid another trap for her.

He offered her the opportunity to get into a blade lock. By making his left side appear weaker than it was, he made it look as if there was an opening there―one that could only be exploited if she pressed in hard and used a ton of force, committing to a full-powered attack.

She took it.

With her mindset as it was, she really wanted to hit him, and hit him hard. She wanted to land an equally devastating blow to the one he had already landed on her, in order to even the score. That's why it hadn't taken much convincing to get her to attack with as much force as she was able.

This meant that any sort of trap that involved punishing a player for attacking with too much power would be extremely effective against her.

So that became his plan.

Their blades crashed into each other.

...Then Kirito punched her in the face with his opposite hand.

It was an incredibly effective technique to use against newer players. Noobs tended to fail to understand that battles did not have to be limited to just swords. There was no reason why you couldn't get creative by using your fists or your feet as well.

New players saw a weapon in their opponent's hand and became laser-focused on it… ignoring all of their other limbs. This weakness was so rampant among noobs that it was routinely exploited by more experienced players.

Kirito had been a noob himself, once, so he knew all about the common mistakes that stemmed from a lack of experience.

Taking the opportunity, Kirito drove his heel as hard as he could into the girl's solar plexus, driving all the air out of her and making her drop to her knees.

He was about to punish her again for dropping her guard and falling to the floor, but she managed to avoid it at the last moment, proving that she was at least skilled enough to avoid being completely flattened by him in an instant.

The girl managed to block his followup attack and got up to her feet before creating a little bit of distance between them. She hesitated for a brief moment and Kirito could see a newfound wariness in her eyes.

The fight had definitely not proceeded the way that she had expected it to.

...But the girl did end up attacking him once again anyway, after only a few seconds of hesitation.

Then they continued the battle.

Once again, Kirito started to get a bit nervous. Watching the girl's HP drop more and more, he quickly realized that he was going to have to stop using his sword entirely at some point.

It was just doing too much damage.

If he kept at it, the girl would die. For now, he planned on transitioning into progressively weaker and weaker attacks to try and buy himself as much time as possible to figure out a way to actually end the fight for good, without having to end her life.

He lowered his gaze slightly and noticed that the girl was still slightly hunched over―likely due to the fact that Kirito had winded her with that kick earlier.

Due to that, the girl was still struggling—though that didn't stop her from swinging wildly at anything and everything in her reach. The kick had had a noticeable effect on her, but it was not enough to end the fight. It had done little more than slow down her frenzy just the slightest bit.

After seeing this, Kirito realized that he was going to have to eventually switch over to hand-to-hand combat entirely. Kicks and punches did far less damage than swords and other weapons did, after all. Once her HP got too low, they would be his only non-lethal options remaining.

But he still had a little bit more time before he'd have to switch to them. If he could, he wanted this girl to realize on her own before then that, if the battle continued, she would lose, and that she probably wouldn't even land a single hit on him at all during it. That it was entirely one-sided and that she had no chance of winning.

He could only hope that she was in the right state of mind to realize something like that. Otherwise, he wasn't really sure what he could do to end the battle.

The girl was being a bit more cautious now―which was a good sign, as it indicated that she had learned something from the duel so far, at the very least.

But she was still being too reckless.

Kirito mentally marked out a spot on her HP gauge and told himself that he would stop using his sword only when her HP lowered to that point.

But since he still had some space to work with until then, he kept on using his weapon for the time being.

Kirito punished every single one of the girl's mistakes, mercilessly, in a final attempt to get her to understand the reality of her situation.

He was not trying to be polite, and this was not a training duel to teach her how to fight. Kirito had every intention of turning this into a completely one-sided victory.

If she was going to lunge at him like an animal, then he'd put her down like one.

He exploited every last mistake to the maximum extent that he was able, stopping just short of landing a lethal attack.

He had started out with subtle things.

A flaw in her guard that gave him a tenth of a second to give her an extra papercut or two.

Tipping her slightly off balance.

Redirecting her attention with a feint.

...But as the fight continued to go on, Kirito started to get a little bit bolder.

He now had a very good understanding of how the girl fought when she was angry. There was little variability in how she responded to his attacks. If Kirito struck from a specific angle, she would always try to defend herself in the same way, making it very easy for him to predict exactly how the course of the battle would unfold. Kirito could visualize a ten-hit combo in his head, and predict with near-perfect precision exactly how she would try to deal with it, allowing him to easily pinpoint all the holes that he could exploit several moves in advance.

He had an overwhelming advantage due to her current mental state, annoying as it was to deal with. But, the way he saw it, if she was going to keep making dumb decisions while she was angry, then there was no reason for him not to exploit them.

In fact, the angrier she was, the dumber her attacks seemed to get.

And something about that realization just pissed him off. This girl was not the only angry player in the room and he was starting to want to demonstrate that to her. Kirito was pretty irritated himself. At her.

An argument could even be made that he had more reason to be angry than the girl did.

So he gritted his teeth.

Some part of him wanted to dish out a little bit of revenge. He had been too analytical and calculating during the fight, so now he decided to take the metaphorical gloves off for a little while.

He changed up his strategy a little.

He did make an attempt to justify it to himself―if she was going to make a ton of mistakes when she was angry, then might as well keep her that way, right?―but it was mostly bullshit.

He just wanted to piss her off even more.

So Kirito created another opening and punched her in the nose.

He made that his target. Every single mistake she made from that point forward would be punished in the same way. A punch in the nose. Every time.

The idea behind it was two-fold. It kept her HP from dropping too low as punches didn't do very much damage on their own, but... it was also pretty satisfying to do.

Nothing would piss her off more than getting repeatedly punched in the face in the same exact way over and over again, he figured. It'd make it seem like he was toying around with her and not taking the fight seriously, which would frustrate the crap out of her and force her to keep falling into more and more of his traps.

It would create a vicious cycle. Maybe she'd even learn something from the experience.

' _I think you'll find that I might just be angrier than you are,'_ Kirito thought with a glare.

The girl swung wide.

Kirito punched her in the nose.

She miscalculated the position of her feet, leaving her slightly off-balance and leaning too far to the left.

Kirito punched her in the nose.

She used a sword skill―and missed with it―causing her to get stuck in cooldown at the wrong moment.

Kirito punched her in the nose.

She suddenly screamed and hurled her rapier at him.

...This actually did come as a bit of a surprise, but Kirito managed to deflect it at the last moment.

But then straight away, he took a step forward and punched her in the nose.

Stunned, she took a few steps backwards and reached up to cradle her nose with her hands. It was a reflex that anyone could be forgiven for still having. Those punches of his definitely would have broken her nose had they landed in the real world, after all. But it took a while for the brain to understand and adapt to the differences between the real and virtual worlds―and the lack of permanent injuries and pain in particular. It was clear that the girl had not been in Aincrad for long enough for that to happen yet.

She still reacted as if she were being hit for real.

After realizing that nothing was broken―nothing could break in this place―the girl glared at him once again and lunged.

With her literal, bare hands.

It was a crazy and utterly suicidal move that she only attempted because she was so mad―but she was finally stopped when Agil stepped in and restrained her from behind.

After taking a look at the girl's expression, Kirito got the distinct impression that maybe, just maybe, he had taken it a bit too far there.

But he wasn't sorry.

The girl looked a bit like an animal with rabies that was frothing at the mouth.

"You need to calm down!" Agil shouted as he locked the girl in what was essentially a full-Nelson. "This guy is way too good to beat like this! We have to work together!"

"Let me go!"

"Asuna! What the fuck?!" Diabel shouted, in total shock. He had been watching that one-sided trainwreck of a battle and couldn't believe what he was seeing all throughout it. But, just like Agil, he had been too stunned to actually try to interfere until that moment.

The girl turned and glared at him.

"You're fucking crazy!" Diabel yelled at her. "What the hell was that?! Are you trying to get yourself killed?!"

"Shut up, Dish Soap!" Asuna shouted back furiously. "I still owe you a one-way ticket down the steps outside!"

"D-dish Soap?!"

"This is personal!" she shouted. "So stay out of it! Both of you!"

"How the hell is it personal?!" Diabel asked.

"He betrayed me!"

"How?!"

"He saved my life earlier! Made me feel like I mattered! And now he's stabbing me in the back and treating me like garbage! I want an explanation!"

"You're not mad about the stairs?" Diabel tried.

"Shut the hell up about the stairs! I'm furious about that! It's just not the main point! I'm allowed to be mad about two things!"

"Well, you're not gonna get an explanation from him like this! You're going to lose and he's going to get away! Do you really want that!"

"I won't let him!"

"Asuna!" Diabel shouted, getting her attention. "You are not strong enough to defeat this guy! I'm not strong enough to beat this guy! Nobody here is strong enough to beat this guy!"

Diabel gestured over to the hooded player.

"This guy probably can't beat this guy, fuck!" Diabel continued his rant. "This guy is probably the strongest player in the whole game! I've never seen anyone move the way that he does!"

None of that was an exaggeration either. He truly believed that they were fighting the strongest player currently in the game.

"You're going to lose!" Diabel could not stress that point any harder than he did.

Asuna winced. The vicious snarl on her face began to fade.

"We have to work together or we'll never win!" Diabel continued. "We'll team up on him. None of us here can fight this guy in a one-on-one. He's just too good. But he won't win a three-on-one. You want to capture this guy, right? Let's do this properly!"

It took a few moments, but eventually, Asuna took in a deep breath and sighed.

"Okay," she said. "I want twenty minutes alone with him when we're done."

"You can have an hour if you want."

"I want that."

She wanted that a lot, actually.

* * *

The four players inside the boss room were now having a standoff right next to the boss door. Tempers had cooled significantly on all sides during the temporary intermission in the battle and everyone seemed to have their heads on straight once again.

They had all silently agreed to stay where they were―on the outskirts of the room―to avoid the possibility of Illfang or any of his minions from getting involved in the fight as the four players were all currently outside the monsters' visual ranges.

Diabel, Agil, and Asuna all understood the hooded player's strategy to kick them outside the room and close the door by now, and so they all knew that standing right next to it like this was intrinsically dangerous. But they figured that it would be too difficult for their opponent to knock them all outside the room in a single instant like that, so they decided that it was worth the risk. There were three of them, after all. Only one of them needed to stay inside the room to prevent the player's plans from succeeding. If the unknown player was going to try something, then they would just be able to scatter.

If two of them were kicked out, then the third only had to buy enough time for the other two to come back.

"Why are you going to such lengths?" Agil asked, breaking the silence. "Why are you trying to stop us from killing Illfang?"

Kirito didn't answer. But the answer was pretty straightforward.

All along, Kirito had wanted to use the players as guinea pigs so that he could study that ranged attack with his camera. Since that had failed, more extreme measures would now need to be taken.

He had deemed it necessary to finally pull out his final, ultimate, backup plan. He had never thought that he'd be pushed to go so far, but the way things were heading, it was the only option he had left on the table.

If he had the room to himself, he could lock the door and activate Hide.

That's it. That was the extent of his plan.

When he turned invisible, neither Illfang nor the minions would be able to spot him, and no player would be able to enter the room to interrupt him because it'd be locked. This would effectively roadblock the rest of the players from ever entering the room again until after Kirito was done soloing the boss, no matter how long that took. He could lock them out like this for days, or even weeks because there was no limit to how long he could keep his camouflage active, and there was also no known limit to how long the boss door could be locked when a battle was in progress. So this would create a perpetual stalemate until Kirito himself resolved it when he was good and ready. And he would have all the time in the world to solo the boss in the meantime.

He had come up with this plan quite some time ago, but he hadn't wanted to use it. He had just wanted the players to lose so that he could figure out when they were going to try again and so that he could plan his own solo attempt around that. It was just easier to do it that way, and it wouldn't involve such a blatant and open display of hostility.

Roadblocking the rest of the players for days or weeks at a time on the first floor would definitely not go unnoticed. The other players would know that someone was inside the room and he imagined that they would not take too kindly to the situation.

Everyone would know what was going on, and they'd be furious. Especially after the stories that this group of players told everyone, about the hooded player that had stopped them from defeating the boss.

This plan was way too bold to be considered under normal circumstances, and so he had simply kept it in the back of his mind, mostly as a thought experiment. He had known that it was theoretically possible to do, but since it was such a massive middle-finger to everyone else, he had not taken it seriously.

Until now.

Illfang had proved to be too easy to defeat. Far easier than expected. Kirito now knew that a full raid party of players was not going to be needed to kill this boss at all. A small group could pull it off after what they had all seen, and the other players knew it. They had taken way more people than necessary on their first attempt, and they would not need to take nearly as many precautions on their second go around.

So Kirito's original plan was not going to work.

He had no choice anymore. It was roadblock or bust and it was now or never. If the players got a second attempt, they would win. Kirito was never going to get what he wanted unless he took drastic measures.

"You know…" Agil began. "Things might work out better if we talk about this instead."

Kirito almost couldn't believe the suggestion. The fact that the shopkeeper was still willing to talk things out after everything that had happened made him realize that Agil was without a doubt the biggest man in the room. He was way too nice to be caught up in this situation.

"Why don't you tell us what you're trying to do and then maybe we can come to an agreement? We don't have to fight, you know."

There was a brief moment of silence as they awaited Kirito's reply.

...However, he had no intention of giving one with the risk of his voice being recognized.

"That's definitely not happening," Asuna stated. "Nobody needs to talk right now."

She sounded more than a little irritated at the suggestion and she was clearly out for blood. Peacefully resolving the conflict was not something that she seemed even slightly interested in.

"Now, now… maybe Agil has a point."

"Nobody asked you, Dish Soap. So shut up."

There was another intense moment of silence as the standoff at the door continued.

"Is it because of my hair?" Diabel asked after about a dozen seconds of nobody saying anything.

"Actually," Asuna replied immediately, turning to face him and sounding more than happy to explain her insult, "It's because of a lot of things. So take your pick. You're slippery and get everywhere that no one wants you to get to, you make people slip and fall a lot―me in particular for some reason―you're blue, you're not very good at what you're marketed for―passable at best, really. What? If I throw water on you, are you going to fizz up an unnecessary amount, too?"

"Huh. You put a weird amount of thought into that," Agil mumbled aloud.

"Wow," Diabel replied. "Has anybody ever told you that you're kind of a bitch?"

"You just tackled me down a staircase! I'm allowed to be angry!"

She turned to face the blue-haired player and started ranting.

"Have you seen how many stairs are in that thing? It's a comical amount! Nobody needs that many stairs anywhere! And I fell, all the way from the top to the bottom! Twice! And to top it off, I was betrayed by one of my heroes and I don't know why! Today was a bad day, okay! So sorry for being a little high-strung!"

Diabel cleared his throat and prepared to continue the argument.

Agil, however, interrupted it before they could continue.

"Now is not the time, you two. You can continue your lovers' spat later."

This comment, however, made things worse.

Asuna turned and stared blankly at Agil for several extremely long and uncomfortable moments before finally giving her reply.

"You're a friendly guy, Agil, and I like you a lot. But if you imply that Dish Soap and I are together to my face like that again, I'll ream your ass out with my rapier."

"What the fuck?" Diabel muttered, bewildered. In his opinion, a simple: ' _we're not together'_ would have sufficed.

"Don't think I won't," Asuna pressed.

As Agil raised his eyebrow in astonishment―as he had not expected a reply like that at all― and prepared to reply, Kirito chose that opportunity to strike.

If these players were going to take their attention off him and have an argument, then he was going to take them all down when they weren't looking.

"Look out!" Diabel shouted. He lunged forward and just barely blocked the attack that would have impaled Agil straight through the back.

"Let's all agree to disagree, okay?" he said, struggling to hold back Kirito's attack. "Asuna and I aren't together, never will be, and we can all fight each other later. Like you said Agil, now is not the time!"

The battle continued from there.

* * *

As the battle raged on, Kirito quickly realized that he was going to need to depend on an old principle in order to win.

Despite his best efforts, he quickly discovered that they were pretty much evenly matched. The three-on-one battle was much more difficult to handle than he had originally expected. And what was worse was the fact that they were slowly starting to adapt to each other's fighting styles and were working together. They were getting tighter as a team, and they were starting to cover for each other's weaknesses.

They were getting harder and harder to fight against, and so Kirito had to make a decision.

He was going to take advantage of the fact that he was still holding back.

Rather than slowly allow himself to reveal more and more of his skills gradually over time, allowing them to gradually adapt to his pace, he made the decision to go from zero to a hundred in an instant. He was doing everything he could to shape the course of the battle and was keeping his eyes peeled for a single moment of opportunity. As soon as one would present itself, he was going to go all out.

If it went according to plan, he'd be able to take every single one of them by surprise, and kick them all out of the room in just a handful of seconds.

But he was starting to get anxious. Because so much could go wrong. So much had already gone wrong.

But he didn't see any other options.

He started slowly maneuvering his opponents in the way that he wanted. He revealed false weaknesses in his guard to encourage them to attack. Despite the fact that they all knew he was a dangerous opponent, Kirito knew that they were still underestimating him.

None of his three opponents understood just how high the PvP skill ceiling was. They didn't understand that Kirito was still only half-assing the fight. They simply wouldn't be able to comprehend what he was like when he went all out.

But he had to take them by surprise. They would adapt if he didn't, and start pulling underhanded tactics. Their mindset would shift upon understanding that they couldn't win, and they would scatter throughout the room until more reinforcements came.

To win, he had to do everything perfectly, and win instantly.

His anxiety continued to rise.

He deliberately faltered and allowed Asuna's rapier to barely graze him.

Kirito saw the eager expression in her eyes. The girl reminded him of a wild animal that had just caught the scent of blood.

It would just take one perfect moment…

* * *

The moment arrived.

Kirito lowered his guard, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

As expected, in that single second, all three of his opponents converged on him with their respective weapons.

Kirito summoned the dagger from his sleeve.

Then he spun and lashed out with both of his weapons.

He kicked Diabel in the stomach and, while flipping, deflected both Asuna's rapier and Agil's axe. Due to his high AGI stat, even despite the crazy acrobatics he had just performed, he was still able to land on his feet first, before the other three, and so he was able to continue his attack by pushing his virtual body to its limits.

Agil happened to be the closest, and so Kirito chose to deal with him first.

With a series of incredibly rapid strikes with his weapons, Kirito manipulated Agil's axe horizontally in front of him and plunged his dagger into the center of Agil's forearm.

Kirito knew from experience that that part of the arm was strangely sensitive in the game. It was almost like hitting a pressure point. Players that were stabbed there for the first time reacted almost as if they had been tased. This had been discovered accidentally during the beta by the PvP community and, ever since, the elite players among that group had learned to take advantage of it. It was a sensation that you had to get used to in order to learn how to suppress the instinctive jerking reaction from being stabbed there. Kirito knew that Agil was a merchant and would not have this experience, so targeting this point would prove to be effective.

And it was. Agil reacted exactly as Kirito had expected, and his left arm jerked. His grip loosened.

Without a moment's delay, Kirito pried the dagger out of the man's arm, rotated Agil's wrist, and stabbed the blade right through the back of his hand. This finished the job of forcing his hand open and Kirito was able to easily pry it off the handle of the man's axe.

Kirito left his dagger impaled in the man's hand, dropped the sword in his other hand to the ground, then grabbed the handle of the axe in front of him with both hands. He used it as a handle and pulled himself forward into Agil's guard.

With a flying knee followed by a headbutt, Kirito knocked the man backwards and, with a sudden twisting motion, pried the axe clean out of his grasp.

With complete control over the weapon, Kirito twirled it around and whacked the back of Agil's foot with it, tripping him and causing him to fall to the floor. In the same motion, he turned and hurled it at the two players behind him.

Kirito had achieved all of this in about three and a half seconds.

"Shit! Look out!"

In his peripheral vision, Kirito saw Diabel tackle Asuna to the ground to avoid the flying axe. In the meantime, Kirito grabbed Agil by the leg and, taking advantage of the ridiculous strength of his avatar, dragged him into a decent throwing position. He spun the man around a few times using the helicopter technique he had invented earlier back when he had been experimenting with using Illfang's weapons. With it, he was able to get some rotational momentum built up and tossed him high into the air in the general direction of the door.

Because of the fact that summoning a weapon back to the hand was slower than pulling out a new one, Kirito pulled out his next hotkeyed sword and was re-armed almost instantly.

Kirito took advantage of his built-up rotational momentum and, instead of coming to a stop after throwing Agil, he used it to drop into a sword-skill powered spin. He whipped through the air, landed on one foot, jumped, and directed every ounce of strength he could into Agil's gut before the man could hit the ground.

This blew him clean out of the room.

With Agil gone for the foreseeable future, there were only two players left to deal with.

The instant Kirito landed, he was gunning for the next closest player.

Asuna and Diabel were only just then climbing to their feet when Kirito closed the remaining distance to them.

Kirito took some satisfaction in watching the looks of absolute terror appear on their faces at what had just transpired before their eyes. Clearly, they had not anticipated his sudden and radical increase in speed.

For a moment, Kirito was split on his decision on who among the two players in front of him to attack first, but this decision was ultimately made for him when Diabel gently pushed Asuna from behind, straight into Kirito's line of fire.

Frankly, this floored him. Asuna too, was stunned. Being shoved from behind had not been expected so she had no chance whatsoever and wasn't even able to raise her guard before it was too late. As a result, it only took Kirito about one second to eviscerate her. She was in the red zone when Kirito blasted her out of the room with a kick, but he had made sure that she wouldn't die by carefully restricting his attacks. He knew that she would be fine, but he did toss a hotkeyed HP potion after her on a similar trajectory just to set his mind at ease.

If she needed one, she could pick that one up after she landed and use it.

It was at this moment that Kirito finally heard the impact of Agil landing somewhere off in the distance, outside the room.

Only about seven seconds had elapsed since he had gone all out.

While Asuna began her own journey through the skies, Kirito turned over towards where he had seen Diabel run off to and prepared to attack the player immediately.

However, annoyingly, Diabel was making no attempt to fight. He had simply turned tail and was now booking it towards the far wall.

' _You fucking dirtbag.'_

Kirito immediately sprinted after him.

It took several seconds to close the distance from behind but when he did, Kirito tackled him, interrupting whatever he had been trying to do with his menu.

Kirito flipped him over, sat down on top of the player, and looked up, noticing all the minions and the boss looking directly at them.

Diabel had run straight into their line of sight, and all the monsters were now preparing to charge at them. However, whether this had been an intentional part of Diabel's plan or not, Kirito had a countermeasure ready.

He immediately activated Hide and, as a result, the two of them suddenly vanished. All the monsters lost their targets and so none of them ended up making their way over.

Kirito opened his menu, pressed a few buttons, and placed a bag of cor down on Diabel's chest.

"I will give you a million cor if you walk out that door."

Diabel's eyes widened.

"You see this?" Kirito asked. "Check it. It's all there. Get out now, and make sure the other two follow you."

If he could get this player to leave voluntarily, it would make things so much easier. Diabel had sprinted a good distance away from the door and so it would take Kirito some time to drag him all the way back if he had to do it by force. It was a task that he probably wouldn't even be able to do successfully before the other two players made it back inside the room.

Paying him would be faster, and may even be the only way to succeed now.

"W-why?" Diabel asked. He was completely pinned onto the ground.

"I'm gonna count to three. You have until then to decide."

"W-wait!"

"One."

"Hold on a sec!"

"Two."

…

"Three."

...

"What's your decision?"

Diabel looked up at him for a few moments.

...Then Kirito clicked his tongue in annoyance upon noticing the defiant gleam there.

"My honour is not for sale."

Kirito couldn't believe the reply he got.

"Are you kidding me?! What honour?! You just sacrificed a girl to save yourself, you asshole!"

Kirito yanked the other player to his feet, fully intending to drag the hypocritical bastard out the door.

But, in a childish display of resistance, Diabel went completely slack, toppling over and falling back down to the ground, refusing to so much as carry his own weight.

Kirito was going to have to carry him around like a sack of potatoes.

He spent the next ten or so seconds hurriedly pulling the other player back towards the door.

But Kirito felt an incredibly uneasy feeling pass over him upon noticing Diabel's menu open and him typing away at something as he was dragged across the floor.

Kirito took a closer look and saw the player messaging someone.

Anxiety at its peak, Kirito raced toward the door as fast as he could, prepared to toss Diabel outside, but then he froze when he was about twenty meters away.

He took two more steps, and then came to a stop.

...

Kirito's jaw went slack at the sight that greeted him in the doorway.

He had no words.

His grasp on the back of Diabel's armour went slack, and the player dropped to the ground.

"Is that the guy?" a player that Kirito had never seen before asked, as he stood in the doorway, pointing straight at him.

A fourth player entering the battle on its own was bad enough news on its own to warrant concern. But what really troubled him was what was behind the newcomer.

A huge crowd of more than thirty players was now standing in the doorway, all blocking his path.

The whole raid group.

Asuna was standing right in the front row with a vicious grin on her face.

"Oh, yeah," she confirmed with a savage, unbelievably self-satisfied smirk. "That's the guy alright."

Kirito heard the blue-haired player behind him start to laugh.

Diabel stood up, dusted himself off, and walked in front of Kirito.

Kirito was in way too much shock to react.

His weapons lowered.

"You almost had us there, not gonna lie," Diabel cheerfully admitted. "You were really good. But it's over now."

Diabel turned and placed both of his hands on Kirito's shoulders as if they were best buddies before leaning in close and gesturing over towards the crowd of players before him.

"You see that sight right there?" Diabel asked, over Kirito's shoulder. "That is what your defeat looks like. While you were busy kicking our asses, I was busy calling in reinforcements."

Diabel smirked victoriously.

"You just lost," he declared.

Diabel let go of him and started casually walking over towards the group of players by the door, leaving his back completely exposed.

The message was clear. He no longer saw Kirito as a threat.

Once Diabel reached the midway point between the two sides, he stopped in place.

"I hope you don't plan on teleporting out of here," Diabel spoke to the orange player behind him, without turning around to face him. "You may have hidden your cursor but everyone here knows what colour it is. You attacked me first, remember? When you materialized out of thin air and punched me just as I was about to land the last attack on the boss? I bet you're regretting that now. Because it turned you orange. If you try to escape by teleporting now, you'll be attacked by the NPC guards. And that's not all, either. I'll have you know that I messaged Argo earlier and she and her people are now currently watching the teleport gate and I'd love to see you try to get past them."

Diabel suddenly started speaking to the players assembled in front of him.

"Everyone! Don't let the player behind me escape, but don't kill him either! I want him alive! That means we'll be relying on the retrieval squad! So make an opening for them! Cut his HP down to ten percent, and let them take it from there!"

"He is extremely skilled at vanishing," Diabel continued. "So we will be relying on all the players with the Searching skill to keep your Search modifiers constantly active! Don't let him disappear! And if you have an opportunity, break through his Mask and find out who he is!"

"Once he's down we'll finish off Illfang!" Diabel shouted. "The boss is already almost dead as it is, so it'll only take another minute at the most!"

Diabel raised his sword up to the sky in a cliched, heroic pose.

"We can still win the day! Everyone charge!"

The group of players let out a battle cry and rushed into the room.

Kirito watched them pour into the room in complete disbelief.

* * *

Capturing a player alive was not something that was attempted very often. It was tricky to pull off. Back in the beta, it was also usually just easier to kill whoever was causing you problems instead, so there weren't a whole lot of examples of someone trying to do this, let alone succeeding in the task.

But it was possible to do, and there were some rudimentary tactics that had been developed to make things easier. The one that was most often used involved the use of what was known as a 'retrieval squad'. Essentially, this was a squad of players who possessed a multitude of abilities or items that could induce paralysis. This group would be made up of players that specialized in this, and they would lie in wait until the primary battle group finished weakening the target―only intervening at the proper moment when victory was assured.

The vast majority of paralysis methods―especially so early on in the game when nobody was really that highly levelled―only worked properly when the target was in a weakened state. In general, the lower their HP, the more effective they would be. So a player could not simply throw a single dagger with a paralyzing agent applied to it and have a full-health target become instantly immobilized. Perhaps on the higher floors, this would become the case once everyone had access to better abilities and unlocks, but it was definitely not true yet. The closest you could get to that involved somehow force-feeding your target a paralysis potion, but that was almost impossible to do to a skilled opponent that knew what they were doing.

This was why this group of players had to plan their assault in this way. The only realistic way to capture someone like Kirito was to lower his health like this first.

It was actually a good plan, some part of Kirito realized. It sounded like something that he would have come up with.

At that moment, as he stared at the group of players charging towards him, in total shock, he didn't know what to do.

Off to his left, a group of players stopped and Kirito noticed their eyes change colours, indicating that every single one of them had activated Search.

Kirito heard a series of shattering noises and immediately looked down at the ground to hide his face from view. Once everyone piled on their Search modifiers, the effects stacked and did an incredible amount of damage to his Hide Rate.

It was completely unfair.

"Are you kidding me?!" a player loudly complained. "Not even this is enough?! How high is this guy's Hiding level?!"

"It doesn't matter! Once he's paralyzed we'll drag him outside this dungeon into the open daylight outside and finish the job there if we have to!"

Kirito quickly checked the heads up display in the corner of his vision that summarized some of the effects he had active at the moment and noticed that everything except for his Mask and Name Hiding abilities had been shattered. His cursor was currently visible, and all of his other Hiding abilities were now disabled. But even with all the players there teaming up on him, they couldn't go any further than that.

This was due to the fact that he had taken advantage of his advanced Hiding skill options a while ago to create a basic program that reallocated his Global Hide Rate solely to those two abilities whenever everything else was taken down. Those were the two most important things that he needed to keep hidden above all others, after all. But prioritizing them like this meant that none of his other Hiding abilities could be used during the fight. But as long as nobody found out who he was, then it was worth it.

While this came as some relief, it was short-lived. Because he still didn't know what to do.

So he just stood there, watching as the group of players closed the distance toward him.

The only thing he could think of that had any possibility of working was accepting his loss and taking his chances by teleporting out of the room. But he had not anticipated the possibility that all the players would coordinate an attack against him like this, and so he had not prepared for running away from Argo of all people.

He wasn't sure if he could succeed in doing that either, because she wouldn't be alone at the teleport gate. He knew how she operated. She would have multiple teams of runners decked out on AGI enhancers whose sole job was to keep track of wherever their target decided to go and report their position to the other players. And since Argo regularly hunted down people with the Hiding skill all the time, they would know exactly how to deal with anything Kirito could dish out.

If he teleported and failed to escape from Argo's trap, his life would basically be over. Everyone would know everything. Questions would be asked, he'd be thrown in prison, and even more questions would be asked once everyone realized that Kirito's cursor was not reverting back to green. There was only one reason why that would happen and everyone knew what that reason was.

Even if Kirito refused to speak a word, and completely resisted, the truth would come out if he was caught.

He was a murderer.

Running away and evading capture wasn't his specialty. And he'd be going against Argo herself if he tried, the master of that domain. He was pretty sure that he wouldn't win that battle.

He couldn't teleport.

...But he couldn't stay, either.

' _What the hell am I supposed to do?'_

He couldn't run away either. The only exit to the room was behind the group of players charging toward him. And with so many players using the Searching skill on him, his Hiding skill was useless. So he couldn't use it to turn invisible and escape that way.

He was about to lose everything, all because he had failed to anticipate and prepare for this series of events.

He was going to die. He was going to be captured, it would be discovered a few days later that his orange cursor was permanent, everyone would deduce that he was a PKer as a result, and then he'd be executed for being a murderer.

At that moment, Kirito knew that he was never going to see his family again.

It was over.

* * *

It always happened the same way. Every single time he was a moment away from achieving his goals, something would always come out of nowhere to rip his victory away from him at the final moment.

He always seemed to be a moment too late.

Over and over again, every single time he found the walls closing in around him, he would always find himself regretting the same exact thing. If only he had acted more decisively, sooner, then he never would have found himself where he was.

During every single battle or conflict he had ever found himself a part of, he would always stall, pull his punches, fail to take his situation seriously, and he would relax way too much during it.

It was always like that. And the worst part was, he would never notice this until after the fact.

How easy would it have been to defeat those two players if he had simply cut the crap, pulled out both of his swords, and went all out with one-hundred percent of his skills, right from the beginning? He'd have kicked them both out of the room and locked the door long before Agil had arrived, and he would have won. None of this would have ever happened.

Who cared if word got around that he could dual wield because of it? If that had not been a good enough opportunity to play that trump card then what would have been? What good was an ability like that if he never used it?

But, no. He hadn't done that. Instead, he had allowed himself to… settle. He had allowed himself to get complacent. He had held back and fought on their level when he was capable of so much more.

He had allowed them to take the win.

It was his fault.

It was always his fault. Because this wasn't the first time that this had happened.

Every single time that he lost at anything SAO-related in the past, it was always due to him not treating the situation seriously enough. Whether that was a PvP encounter or a battle against a boss or a group of monsters, he was never too weak. He always just made a dumb mistake every time due to holding back for too long or being too indecisive.

He couldn't remember the last time that he had gone all out on an opponent and had been genuinely defeated due to their superiority. It was always due to his own mistakes. Even his recent battle against Illfang a few days ago where he had been swatted had been like this. He had been denied the opportunity to go all out by whatever bullshit had happened and because he had failed to plan properly in advance.

Whenever he lost it was always because of this.

His entire battle with Asuna, Agil, and Diabel, consisted of example after example.

' _How many times am I going to make the same exact mistake before I learn anything?'_

All of his plans were now in ruins. He had had this one shot to squeeze through this window of opportunity. To lock the players out, defeat Illfang, and gain the strength required to solo more bosses in the future. It had all depended on this victory right here and now. Without it, all of that―his entire vision for the future―disappeared from his view.

He had blundered it, and let it all slip away.

It was gone now.

He gazed up at the advancing players.

This was the group of players that was going to defeat him. Yet, from a single look, Kirito was able to tell that they were all so far beneath him that it wasn't even funny. They had poor equipment, couldn't move very fast, most weren't wearing any decent armour whatsoever, and yet, Kirito was going to lose to them.

One of the things that Kirito had come to hate more than anything was when a player mistook their incredible luck for skill. When a player repeatedly got lucky breaks and arrogantly thought that they were better than everyone else as a result.

He had never understood it until now, but now he knew. The reason why he ran into people like that so infuriatingly often was because of his own inability to learn from this mistake. He repeated it over and over and over again and he let them get away with it. He always dragged things on needlessly, when he could have easily finished it and this gave them every opportunity to turn things around.

He accepted defeat too easily. He held back―and lost as a result―before ever getting the chance to showcase his best.

Nothing had changed, even after all this time. He was still the exact same as he had always been. Repeating the same dumb mistakes and never learning anything.

...

As this realization sank in, something very different than what he was used to, happened.

Normally, what tended to happen in situations like these was that he would fall into some sort of desperate state of despair and would eventually accept his fate. He'd realize how hopeless the situation was, give up on his original goals and start trying to do damage control. He'd give up on winning entirely, and instead focus on limiting his losses. He'd think that, as long as he escaped with his life intact, nothing else mattered.

But not this time.

For the first time in his life, he could see all of this from the outside. He was watching, and observing, how his thought processes tried to do the same exact thing that they always did. Blindly spiralling down into defeatism.

He had been doing it all of his life and yet, only now did he realize how... utterly disgusted it made him feel.

He was sick of it.

This process had been spinning away inside him all this time, all throughout his life, unnoticed, and only now did he finally realize it. And seeing it play out from the outside for the first time like this was the last straw.

Something inside him recoiled.

Kirito felt a vicious snarl spread across his face.

He was pissed.

For falling into the cycle yet again, and having learned nothing, yet again.

He was pissed at himself, at these players, and at the whole situation he found himself in, and that was an understatement. He could not remember ever having a feeling of rage as intense as the one he felt at that moment.

Something inside him almost audibly snapped, causing the strangest sensation he had ever experienced in his life to appear. It felt like his brain had ripped itself right in half at the center and rearranged itself. For a moment, it gave him a splitting migraine and he could have sworn that he had even gone cross-eyed during it, but the feeling passed about half a second later.

When it was over, he closed his eyes and tilted his head down to the floor.

He had absolutely no idea about what had happened during that moment, but one thing was sure. When he opened his eyes again, he was not the same person anymore.

Everything was gone and it felt like he had reset. He wasn't nervous, angry, depressed, or much of anything anymore.

There was only clarity and the truth.

' _I am never going to lose at anything, ever again,'_ he vowed.

It didn't matter what he tried to do in the future. It didn't matter if he was playing some frivolous game that meant nothing to anyone, or if he was trying to complete a task that would somehow determine the fate of the world.

' _Every single task or goal that I will ever set for myself from this point forward will be met with my absolute victory, without exception. There is no 'try' anymore.'_

' _It all stops here.'_

This had been his last failure. Allowing Asuna, Agil, and Diabel to stall for long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

It would not happen again for the rest of his life.

He stated this with one-hundred percent certainty. As if it were a fact that the universe had no choice but to obey from that point onwards.

' _Not here. Not ever. I don't lose anymore.'_

No matter what it took, he was finally done with it.

The players couldn't see it due to Kirito's Mask ability, but his whole countenance had changed. It was a radical shift. As jarring as a person with split personalities switching over to the other one.

A crazed expression appeared on his face that went unseen due to that Mask, and in that moment, only a single thing was on his mind.

Victory at all costs.

Just in front of him, there was a demarcation on the ground. Two concrete floor tiles met about an inch or so in front of his toes. The thin crease between them was easily visible.

In the final half-second, before the first of the players reached him, he ran the tip of his sword along this razor-thin crack.

' _None of you will pass this line.'_

Their forty-plus player advance would be completely stopped before a single one of them ever crossed over it.

That was the new objective he set for himself. And because he didn't lose anymore, he knew, with absolute certainty, that it was going to happen. He was going to win. In fact, as far as he was concerned, he already had.

* * *

As it turned out, Kibaou was the first player to reach Kirito. With a roar, he ran right in front of the stationary orange player and swung his sword at him with all of his might.

But his strike never landed.

Kibaou's eyes widened in surprise as both of his amputated arms flew off to the sides, carrying his sword with them.

A moment later, he noticed that he was in freefall. When he looked down, he quickly discovered the reason. Both of his legs had been removed at the knees and there was nothing supporting his weight anymore.

He dropped his jaw.

But before he could fully process what had happened, there was an explosion of movement in front of him before he felt a hand grab the side of his head and direct what was left of his destroyed, virtual body face-first into the ground.

He bounced and landed in a heap, facing the ceiling where he remained for several moments. Unable to move whatsoever―effectively a quadriplegic―all he could do was watch as the battle proceeded from there, in shock.

When he finally tuned back into the fight, a few more seconds had elapsed and he found the orange player casually walking forwards towards the group of still-advancing players.

Kibaou's eyes widened. In the few moments of the battle that he had missed due to being slammed into the ground, three other players had been dismembered and were now all in the process of falling to the ground, just as he had been a moment ago.

There was considerable hesitation evident in the next two players that arrived in front of the orange player. They had clearly seen what had happened to the previous four during the opening seconds of the battle and were now very nervous. However, they managed to get over these nerves―probably due to the fact that they were being bolstered by the crowd of screaming players rushing into the action directly behind them.

They shared a quick glance and attacked together.

Two seconds later, both were limbless and lying on the floor.

...But this time, Kiboau had seen it happen right before his eyes.

He was stunned. It was as if the orange player could predict everyone's attacks before they happened and knew exactly how to react to them in advance. It looked like precognition.

And the player was so fast… Even when Kibaou had been watching it unfold right in front of him, it had been nothing but a blur.

By this point though, the main group of players had arrived. The five other players that now all found themselves in the same position as him―as limbless torsos―had all been a bit too eager to jump into the fight as soon as possible, just like he had been, and had sprinted a bit faster than everyone else, causing them to pull slightly ahead of the rest of the group. But the rest of the players had arrived now, and so Kibaou was confident that the battle would be over very quickly as a result.

This wasn't an action movie. Nobody had any intention of coming at the orange player one at a time while everyone else watched and waited their turn. They would surround him, work together, and beat him into the ground using their vastly superior numbers if necessary.

They would attack from all directions, all at once, and Kibaou couldn't wait to see it.

...But things did not happen the way that he had expected them to.

In less than half a second, the orange player went from standing upright on his feet in a typical sword fighting stance, to flipping uncontrollably through the air and rocketing forwards impossibly quickly.

Taken by complete surprise, no one in the group could stop the player from ripping through the crowd in a wild spin that none of them had ever seen before.

Various amputated legs and arms flew into the air and rained down to the ground dropping all manner of weapons and pieces of equipment with them.

Several players dropped to the ground having lost one or more of their legs.

The air was filled with screams.

* * *

"What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck!"

"Shit!"

Players were screaming in terror.

"What the fuck was that?!"

"Help! I can't move!"

"Hold still! I'll get you out of here!"

One player grabbed his buddy by his only remaining arm and started dragging him out of the room towards the door.

"Diabel!" one player shouted, looking over toward where he expected the blue-haired player to be. "We need to re―"

The player gasped and frantically looked around.

Diabel was nowhere to be found.

* * *

Asuna unleashed another flurry of attacks toward her target. All of them were blocked, but she realized that she was starting to get the hang of battling against other players now. She had had it all wrong earlier. The key to duelling against other players was to target unexpected locations and vary the patterns of her attacks to catch her opponents off guard. Unpredictability was better than raw power.

While she didn't quite have the experience necessary to match her current adversary, she was significantly faster than him and her opponent was unable to deal with that for one reason or another. Perhaps he simply had not dealt with very many rapier users in the past, or perhaps she had simply closed the skill gap. She wasn't sure which.

But one thing was certain. When she abruptly crouched low and aimed her Linear at the back of her opponent's foot, he was unable to stop it.

Diabel was blown off his feet and collapsed onto the ground.

"W-we can talk about this!"

"Dish Soap… we are so far beyond talking." She sounded calm but she wasn't. She was anything but.

As soon as the players had charged toward the orange player back there, Asuna had immediately taken the opportunity to get even with the raid leader.

Diabel had been clumsily getting in her way and being a nuisance all throughout the previous battle with the boss and with that orange player. At first, she had been able to look past this as they had needed to work together to defeat the mysterious player, but after being blown down the stairs by the raid leader and then being shoved right into the orange player's path by him, she had finally had enough.

It was beyond obvious that there was no way that the orange player still inside the boss room would be able to handle so many players at once, so, to her, it didn't matter one bit when she took the opportunity to drag Diabel out of the room and kicked his ass.

It wouldn't have made a difference with her being there, so she had left the room while everyone else had been distracted. She was hell-bent on doing one, highly specific thing to the player before her, and if she didn't do it now, she'd lose the opportunity forever.

Asuna kicked the other player in the gut, launching him closer to her destination.

She walked over towards the downed player and kicked his sword out of his grip.

"It was the only way!" Diabel exclaimed.

"What was?! Throwing me to the wolves so you could run to safety?!"

"We needed to stall for time! And fighting wasn't the right way to do that! One of us needed to stay inside the room!"

"If you had told me this we could have done that together!"

"You wouldn't have listened!"

"Why didn't you shove me off to the side instead, then?! There was no reason to throw me right into his path!"

Diabel gained a considering look on his face.

"Huh. Oh yeah. I guess I could have done that."

He turned to the girl bearing down on him and scratched the back of his head sheepishly.

"Whoops."

Asuna's brow twitched and she smiled a very unfriendly smile.

"...Whoops?" She repeated. "That's all that you have to say?"

"It's not a big deal. Everything turned out fine. You're blowing this way out of proportion," Diabel claimed.

Then he said the one thing that sealed his fate.

"You need to calm down."

…

Never in the history of ever had anybody ever calmed down after being told to calm down. This long-held record was not finally broken here either, needless to say.

Asuna reached down, grabbed Diabel by the front of his armour and picked him up, raising his body over her head in a cheesy imitation of some sort of wrestling move.

"Hrrk! W-wait, what are you―?"

"Did he do it like this?" she mumbled to herself, thinking aloud and adjusting her grip.

Then she chucked the blue-haired player head-first down the staircase.

The euphoric release she received upon seeing the annoying player tumble head over heels down the staircase, shouting expletives all the while, caused the biggest grin that she had ever had throughout her entire time in the game so far, to appear on her face.

She started to giggle at the sight.

It was so much more satisfying when she wasn't the one on the receiving end.

After another moment or two of satisfaction, she spat on the ground and dusted off her hands.

"And that's what you get, Dish Soap. Now you know how that feels. We're even now."

Then she turned around and started walking back towards the boss room.

Asuna stopped walking a few moments later, however, upon noticing an unexpected spectator. She turned and faced the man, and the two of them stared at each other for a few seconds without either of them saying anything.

"Why didn't you try to stop me?" she eventually asked.

He definitely could have.

"I figured you needed it," Agil replied. "And I saw what he did to you earlier. Accident or not, I think he probably had it coming."

Asuna stared at the man for a few moments.

"What are you doing out here, anyway?" she asked. "All the action is inside."

"Someone needs to watch the door to make sure that guy doesn't make a break for it. If he tries, I'll be able to see where he goes and follow after him."

"You don't want to get even with him for throwing you around like a ragdoll?"

Agil chuckled.

"I'm not into that sort of thing. I'm a merchant. I'm not so great at duelling other players. I'll leave that to the experts."

"Well, suit yourself, I guess. But―"

Abruptly, a bunch of players started streaming out of the boss room, interrupting their conversation.

"Everybody run! Flee for your lives!" a player shouted, sounding frantic.

"What―?" Asuna turned and watched the proceedings.

The group of retreating players looked terrified.

"That guy is a monster!"

"He's not human!"

"Don't tell me―!" Asuna spoke in astonishment. "Did that player really… defeat everyone?"

Agil's eyes widened in shock.

"I-impossible. There's over forty players here."

But sure enough, only around twenty-five or so players were left standing and most of them were dragging out bodies of other players.

'Bodies,' however, was perhaps not the right word to use for the situation, Asuna quickly realized.

She dropped her jaw at the sheer number of them that had no limbs. Many of the players were just torsos, now. She had never seen anything like it before and the sheer brutality of it gave her goosebumps.

They couldn't even stand up anymore as they had been hacked to pieces. They could only lay there helplessly on their backs like a bunch of turtles that had just been flipped over.

But these players were not the only ones to have missing limbs. Many of the players who were still standing on their feet also had the occasional missing arm or two. And she could even see one that had a missing leg and was struggling to hop around.

 _So_ many limbs had been lost.

"What the hell happened?!" Agil exclaimed, sounding just as stunned as she was.

Abruptly, Asuna gained a look of realization and bolted over toward the door and the crowd of players forming outside.

"You can't let the doors close!" she cried. "Someone has to stay inside!"

Many of the players turned to face her, and one of them spoke up.

"Lady, ain't nobody here dumb enough for that."

"That dude is a fucking psychopath!" another player added. "We need some breathing room, so we'll fight him again out here!"

The interior of the boss room was far more cramped than the cavernous chamber right outside it―even though it was a pretty big space in its own right. It also had the added danger of having to deal with the other monsters inside it―the minions, and Illfang himself. After the players had been faced with such unexpected, staunch resistance from that singular orange player, the collective opinion changed about what they should be doing. It suddenly sounded, to them, like a better idea to deal with their problems one at a time. First the orange player, then the boss. And to eliminate the possibility of having to fight the boss early, before they were ready, everyone had left the room to regroup.

They intended to handle the player outside the boss room where there was more space, and where they wouldn't be constantly hounded by minion attacks.

"No, you don't understand!" Asuna shouted. "He's not trying to fight, he's trying to close the doors!"

"Fucking let him!" another player shouted. "That bastard took off my arm like it was nothing!"

Suddenly, a player that Asuna could only describe as having a bit of a 'leader-ish' aura navigated himself into the group and waved for the others to calm down so that he could speak.

"Where's Diabel?" he asked.

"He's… otherwise indisposed," Asuna replied, slightly guiltily. "He'll be here again in a few minutes."

"...But you can't let him close the door!" she pressed.

"Why not?"

"Because he―" she cut herself off a moment later when she realized that she didn't really know much of anything about what the orange player's plan was.

"Well… I don't really know, actually," she admitted. She knew the just of it. That the orange player wanted the doors to close so that the boss would heal, but other than that, she didn't really know what the player's ultimate goal was, or why he was trying to stop the raid from succeeding. "B-but that's what he's trying to do! We have to stop him!"

"You aren't making any sense!"

"Look," she tried to explain, frustrated, "he said earlier to us that he wanted everyone out of the room so that he could close the doors. I don't know why, but it can't be good!"

"It wouldn't do anything if he did, though," the player replied. "If everyone left the room and the doors closed, all that would happen is the boss would heal. Illfang would instantly regenerate."

"That's what he's after! We have to stop him since Illfang is so low on health already!"

"Why would he want that?"

"Don't you people already know all of this? Didn't Diabel explain it to you?"

"He was rushed and didn't say much in the message. Just that everyone needed to show up immediately to help capture a dangerous player and to finish off the boss. We don't know much else about what happened."

Abruptly, a limbless Kibaou came flying out of the room and landed on the ground right in front of them.

"What the fuck, man?!" the cactus-haired player hollered back, outraged.

"You bastard!" another player shouted, having seen what had happened.

Asuna turned just in time to see the orange player stalk into the doorway of the boss room to face them, blade at the ready. She expected him to make an attempt to close the door, so she quickly readied herself to suddenly sprint into the room. But, to her surprise, he didn't even try to do this. Instead, he casually walked towards the group of players outside the room, leaving the boss room behind him bereft of any players whatsoever.

It was empty now except for Illfang and the minions.

Asuna was astounded to see the reactions from everyone else in the area. For each step the orange player took forward, the rest of the players retreated a step backwards. Somehow, this one player was strong enough to make everyone else start to shake in their boots.

"You bastard!" a player suddenly shouted. "I don't know who you think you are, but I'm not going to let you get away with this!"

He abruptly lunged forward, and this appeared to be the signal for everyone else to attack. His actions served as a catalyst that saw the vast majority of the players still on their feet, join in.

All of these attackers formed a wave that crashed down upon the lone, orange player.

Asuna stayed behind to observe the assault. She watched as they surrounded the player and jumped him from all sides.

The players attacked, and the hooded player _reacted_.

...

Whatever it was that she had expected to see, definitely did not occur.

She couldn't believe what she saw instead.

Her eyes widened.

...Because it was a complete, one-sided slaughter. And not in the direction she had expected.

The orange player demonstrated a level of skill so far beyond what she had seen previously from him that he looked like a completely different person. The speed, the precision, the techniques, everything he was doing was so much more refined than it had been previously that the player was almost completely unrecognizable to her.

And for some reason that she didn't understand, he seemed to be deliberately targeting the limbs of the players around him.

As she watched more and more players drop to the ground, however―having no way to continue the battle―it soon became clear to her as to why he was doing it.

By removing the limbs of the players, he was taking them out of the fight. It did the same thing that paralyzing someone did, she realized. She knew that limbs grew back in this world, but it took a bit of time, so this strategy she was seeing was being used to reduce the total number of combatants that this player had to fight against without ever having to kill anyone.

' _No, wait…'_ Asuna narrowed her eyes as a strange, academic sense of curiosity took over her thoughts as dozens of players were being butchered in front of her.

It was actually even better than that. Whenever this player removed all the limbs of a single player, he actually took two players out of action―the player that had lost his limbs, and the player who was forced to try and carry that fallen player away from danger. It was actually better to leave them alive in this limbless state than it was to kill them and that was clear from the proceedings. If the orange player simply went on a killing spree, he'd have to kill everyone there. But with this strategy, he only had to remove the limbs of half of the group of players to achieve roughly the same effect. In the end, half would be limbless, and the other half would be trying to help out the first half.

And then nobody would be able to stop him.

Asuna had never even imagined that it was possible to move the way that this player was moving. He was flipping and spinning wildly, all over the place. He was upside down just as often as he was right-side-up, and he was flying in between all the attacking players so fast that it was a blur. It took an embarrassing amount of time for her to even see the fact that the player was actually carrying two swords at the same time because he wasn't ever standing still long enough for her to get a good look.

"Stop running at him one at a time!" a player shouted. "Surround him and just fucking… dogpile the bastard!"

"No, you idiot!" a different player replied. "We need shield users! Everyone pull out a shield, make a shield-wall, and fucking ram him with it!"

Players continued shouting suggestions at each other as the battle progressed.

"Use your throwing knives!"

"And throw them at what?! His after-image?! Trying to hit this guy would be like trying to hit a bullet out of the sky with a bow and arrow!"

"The system improves your accuracy!"

"Not by that much you dolt! I'm way more likely to hit you guys than him!"

"Fuck!"

Nobody there seemed to know how to defend against a player that fought like this and so they quickly gave up on trying to face him conventionally at all. The players had no choice but to resort to working together and trying to come up with strange tactics in order to stand a chance.

"Everyone should just, like, lay down in front of him," a lazy-sounding player chimed in.

"You're so fuckin' stupid, Gary. How the hell is that gonna help anything?"

"You'll trip him up and, like, leave him nowhere to land when he jumps."

"He's not going to care whether or not he lands on someone! Everyone will just get trampled if they do that!"

The majority of the players there weren't beta testers. So for most, this was their first time ever battling against another player. So even if this player had battled against them all in a normal, conventional way, they would have still had some trouble. But now? They were completely outclassed. The sheer gap in skill level made it uncomfortable for Asuna to keep watching.

He was literally―and figuratively―tearing them all to pieces.

...Most of them, anyway. A dozen or so players were able to defend themselves surprisingly well―clearly having had a good amount of PvP experience under their belts in the past. But everyone else in the group… not so much.

Asuna continued to watch in disbelief as the orange player battled against enemies from all sides, flawlessly. Nobody had even been able to land a hit yet. The player's movements were just too unpredictable for that.

She clenched her teeth and finally prepared her own attack. She knew that she was not skilled enough to battle someone like this head-on, so she waited for a moment in which his back was facing her. She would have to attack from behind and take him by surprise to even stand a chance. It stung a good bit, having to admit that to herself, but she needed to face the reality of the situation.

She had been unable to keep up with him even before he had started flipping around like a maniac, so what hope did she have now?

So she readied herself, crouching down low, and prepared for a good moment to strike.

When an opportunity finally arrived, she activated a Linear. The skill triggered and she lunged toward the unprotected back of the orange player, eyes peeled for any countermove her target could possibly make.

She covered the entire distance in what seemed to her as the blink of an eye. Even she routinely surprised herself with how fast her virtual body could move when she tried to push it to its limits, and this was a perfect example. Asuna went from standing almost twenty meters away from the player, to right behind him with an extended rapier merely inches away from piercing his back in about a second.

Even Diabel had been unable to keep up with her speed, so she was completely confident that her attack would land. She had caught the player off guard and was simply moving too fast for the thrust to be dodged―

However, contrary to all of her expectations, an instant after she was one-hundred percent sure that her attack was going to run the player through, her rapier hit the ground and she was missing her right arm.

She watched as her virtual body's amputated arm hit the floor and shattered into polygons. For whatever reason, after a body part was removed, the world deleted it from the environment until it grew back. So the floor was not currently covered in the missing limbs of all the players currently taking part in the battle. The equipment that those limbs had once carried, however, was another matter. Various weapons, armour and other pieces of equipment were all scattered across the floor, and now her rapier joined the pile.

She was stunned at this turn of events, to say the least.

Because her opponent hadn't even turned around. His sword had simply swung around behind him at the last moment and clipped her arm off at the elbow. It had been a completely underhanded, wonky, tricky counterattack that she never in a million years would have expected was even possible. The orange player's sword had actually spun around in his hand. Unable to reach so far back, he had used a strange wrist-flick that had caused his entire sword to spin around like a top in his palm. It had done one rotation, cutting off her arm, before he had caught it again and continued the battle with the players in front of him.

It had looked like a completely unnatural and awkward counterattack, but her target had made the movement at the drop of a hat.

He hadn't even looked at her.

She spent the next several moments staring at her newly missing limb, jaw agape, failing to process the sight. Never in her life had she ever expected to look at a giant pocket of empty space where one of her limbs should be. So it was very jarring for her because it had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly. And with the added strangeness of the virtual world that she found herself in, it was even stranger than usual. There was no pain, and she didn't feel much more than slightly inconvenienced by what should have been a grievous injury.

Before she could fully grasp the fact that _her dominant arm was now missing,_ she was reminded―quite rudely if you asked her―of the fact that she had been dumbly standing in the middle of a battlefield for the last five seconds or so, staring at the floor.

She was suddenly kicked in the stomach―yet again―and launched away from the battle.

She landed bonelessly on the ground, trying desperately to reclaim the air that had just been forced out of her lungs.

She had had all the air forced out of her lungs more times in the last five minutes than in the rest of her life combined. For some reason, the orange player kept targeting that part of her body. But, after landing on the ground and trying desperately to reclaim the escaped air, she understood why this was happening to her so often.

During the few times in which she had been seriously winded in real life in the past―typically during a nasty fall after not paying attention to whatever she was doing, or during a tennis match, or one of the few other sports that she had occasionally taken part in―the feeling of losing all the of that air at once was a brutal experience. During these few incidents, her whole focus from that point forward had been on not suffocating, and her whole body would lock up as she desperately tried to breathe.

...And that was because of the fact that humans needed to do that in order to live. Obviously.

There was no air in SAO, though. There was no oxygen. So there was no cellular respiration, or gas exchange going on in the lungs―players didn't even have lungs as far as she could tell, or any other organ really, for that matter.

However, for some reason, the world she found herself in had been designed to force players into breathing anyway. The feeling of being out of breath, and of losing air, was―to a moderate extent at least―replicated by the system.

If you didn't breathe for a while, you felt uncomfortable even though, logically, you shouldn't be. Not really.

So, even though the world was virtual, being winded was without a doubt the most painful sensation she had experienced in the game so far, beating out being thrown down all of those stairs by a long shot. There was actually no comparison between the two. The sensation was still several steps down from how being winded felt in the real world, but it was definitely distracting. With most injuries she had sustained so far, she had been able to shake them off in short order and jump right back into the fight, but being winded forced her to her knees for a few moments and prevented her from doing much else.

And that was why the orange player kept on targeting her there, she realized. Huge impacts to the stomach were a weakness that she had overlooked because of the fact that HP was the only thing that decided whether a player lived or died. She had figured that only attacks that did significant damage to her health bar were worth defending against, since everything else could be brushed off. But she was wrong. Being kicked did almost no damage to her and yet, she had been completely taken out of the fight for the foreseeable future with a single one.

She was definitely going to have to learn how to overcome that weakness in the future. As she found herself gasping for air that she knew didn't exist, clutching her stomach with her only remaining arm, completely incapable of focusing on anything else except for the sounds around her, she made a mental note to try and work on that.

The only thing that she could experience in this state―other than pain―from the world around her, was the sound of the battle raging behind her. She simply could not focus on anything more than that until she got her breath back.

She had been forced to close her eyes and was unable to watch it. But she definitely heard it. The sounds of screaming and cursing players, and a crazy battle going on behind her.

"Motherfucker!"

"What level is this dude?! Fucking… a hundred and ninety?!"

"This is such horse shit!"

"Asuna! Look out!"

Asuna finally turned around upon hearing her name being called and struggled to force open her eyes.

They very quickly widened in alarm.

There were exactly thirteen players left standing from the original raid group. All of the rest of them―some thirty or so other players―were now all limbless torsos lying on the ground. Even Agil was in that state now.

Worst of all, the orange player was now advancing directly towards her, as the rest of the players were all currently occupied with trying to aid the other fallen players.

"Just… wait," Asuna pleaded in a breathless whisper, still struggling to catch her breath as the orange player arrived and stood over her.

The orange player stopped and stared down at her for several moments before finally speaking.

"I saw what you did to Diabel a few moments ago when I was inside the boss room."

' _Uh-oh.'_

She _really_ didn't like the sound of that.

There was a clear line of sight from the top of the stairs where she had dragged Diabel a little while ago, all the way into the boss room―even as far back as Illfang's throne itself. So the orange player had been able to see what had happened easily enough.

But the really uncomfortable part about what the player had said to her was not exactly what he had said, but rather, how he had said it.

He sounded a lot different now when compared to earlier. The actual tone of his voice was much darker and crueller. It gave her an uncomfortable, foreboding feeling.

"Good for you," the orange player continued. "But you're going to regret it. I'll make sure of that. Because it gave me an idea I wouldn't have otherwise had."

Asuna could only offer token resistance in her current state to what happened next. All of which was handily brushed aside with ease.

In no time at all, she found herself in the very familiar, though absolutely infuriating position that she had come to hate. Being manhandled and dragged across the floor by her hair. He was relentless and gave her no time to fully recover beforehand.

"Since you attacked me again, it's clear that you still haven't learned your place in the world yet. Allow me to show it to you again."

"No…! Wait…!" she desperately gasped out. "You are not going to do this to me again! I won't let you!"

They were making a beeline straight towards the top of the staircase.

She struggled mightily to resist and started yelling at him as best as she could in her semi-winded state, but Kirito had been practicing recently. He was starting to get really good at dragging people around through the use of their hair now, and he had since developed and refined a multitude of techniques to make things proceed smoother.

He backhanded her across the face, shutting her up.

"I can and I will, Stumpy. We're doing this again. And we'll keep doing this again until you learn."

He wasn't shouting. It was a tone of voice that was hard to describe. Almost like he was a commander who was giving out orders to people. Stern, but calm. But also with a dark, cruel edge to it.

A furious expression flashed across Asuna's face and it turned completely red. There were lots of things that she was mad about at that moment, but there was no way to react to every single one of them all at once. And it just so happened that right at the top of her list of ' _things that happened in the last five seconds that I'm mad about',_ her new apparent nickname happened to appear first by coincidence, so that was what she focused on for now, electing to get mad about the other things in the following seconds.

"S-stumpy?!" she roared, furious.

It was the first time that she had been called that―and she knew exactly why she had been called that―but she knew immediately that she absolutely hated that name with all her heart.

"You and this staircase were made for each other," the orange player explained to her as if he were talking about the weather. "You were destined to be together. Like long-lost lovers."

He kicked her legs out from under her as she tried to stand up and yanked her head to the side, throwing her off balance.

"It's actually pretty romantic, wouldn't you agree?" the player continued as he threw her onto the ground, right onto the top step of the staircase.

Before she could struggle to her feet and get up, Kirito grabbed the back of her head and planted her cheek back down into the stone, giving her an up-close and personal view down the hundreds of stairs that she knew she was about to be thrown down, yet again, in mere moments.

"I promise you that you will become intimately familiar with each and every step in this thing before your time in this game is through. You will be spending a lot of time together in the future and I expect you to thank me for it all later."

Asuna had no idea how to react to being treated in this way. To her, it felt like she was being treated like a dog that had just done something naughty or had made a mess on the floor and was now having her nose rubbed in it to make sure she wouldn't do it again.

Never in a million years had she ever expected to be put into a situation like that for real. It was completely outside the realms of what she had considered possible. She had never planned out what she would do in a hypothetical situation like this, so she had literally no idea how to act. It was without a doubt the most degrading, humiliating thing anyone had ever done to her, but she was in shock, having no idea what to say or do in response.

It was surreal... the fact that someone would do something like this to her. She was used to being praised and complimented all the time from her peers due to her looks and her grades. Not… whatever this was.

' _What the hell is happening right now? Is this real?'_

It was like the other player had just snapped. Like he was just gone. The orange player that she had been interacting with this whole time had all of a sudden, been replaced by an insane psychopath. But instead of shouting and screaming at anyone, he seemed to be the type that got _real_ quiet instead.

And that, on some level, terrified her. If he had been shouting at her instead, she'd at least know what he was thinking.

Kirito suddenly yanked her up to her feet and lifted her off the ground.

"Stop!" she cried.

It didn't do any good.

Kirito raised her high up into the air.

"I hate you so much―!" the girl screamed.

Then Kirito chucked her down the staircase.

"Nobody cares."

This time, however, rather than sit by and watch her tumble down them all, he immediately turned around and stalked over towards the remaining players that still had limbs attached.

* * *

Kirito had always felt like there were two of him.

...Sort of.

It wasn't like he had split personalities or anything as extreme as that, but it had always felt like there was another version inside him that possessed an incredible amount of both strength and skill. On various occasions throughout his life, during times when the pressure was on and he needed to come out with a win, it had always felt like he had delved deep within himself and tapped into a small portion of the power that this other version of himself possessed. When he was in the right state of mind to do this, he would very suddenly, and inexplicably, drastically increase his reflexes and overall abilities.

He had experienced this a couple of times in the past. Even in real life to a limited extent, in a couple of Kendo matches when he was younger. But the majority of these instances happened in video games when the stakes were high and losing wasn't an option.

When the pressure was at its height, so was he. His ordinary abilities when he was not in that state utterly paled in comparison.

When he was in this state, through―drawing on this weird inner power―his personality changed. His easy-going, relaxed attitude vanished, and in its place was a much more serious, almost cruel substitute that was entirely objective-oriented.

But in most of these instances in the past, this change to his demeanour was never really noticeable. Because he never really drew all that much power from this part of him―just enough to win. So his personality would only change a little bit to reflect that.

It had always felt like a trickle. Providing just enough power to overcome whatever threat he was facing, and vanishing soon afterwards.

This had even happened a couple of times over the past month in the game. His battle with those Little Nepenthes on the first day came to mind. Back then, he had achieved this hyper-focused state and it had saved his life.

And now, he was in that state again.

But in this instance, it was completely different than what he was used to. Rather than a small trickle, it felt like he had dived deep down the rabbit-hole, head-first, and had completely swapped places with this other version of himself.

The trickle was now at full blast providing him full access to one-hundred percent of everything. His maximum potential was at his fingertips and he had never experienced anything like it before. Everything around him felt like it was moving way slower than it usually did, and every movement he made just worked.

He had a vast library of combat techniques at his disposal, but many of them he never bothered to use because they had a significant chance of failing on him due to him screwing up the timing. They were probabilistic, and some had worse than fifty-fifty odds of working on a normal day. Risky moves like these he only ever used when he felt this power flowing through him, because only then did they ever seem to work.

In his current state of mind, however, there was no longer any risk of failing them. Everything would work one-hundred percent of the time, and he could do it all with ease.

He knew that they would work flawlessly. It was assumed. And he knew that he was going to win this fight he was currently in. It was as if everything was preordained and he could see it all.

His whole body almost felt like it was vibrating, and his mind was completely focused on the objectives in front of him. He didn't care about what anyone thought about him anymore, and he no longer had any filter.

He simply said what he thought now, and didn't give a shit about if it made him look like an evil asshole or a dick. He dished out revenge on the players that he felt had wronged him, and he was completely focused on achieving his goals.

Disable all the players, close the door, and lock them out. And do this without killing anyone.

There would be no compromise or negotiation. He was going to dismember every single remaining player that was standing against him so that they could no longer stop him, even if they tried.

He was tired of trying to close the door only to be stopped at the last instant by a nosy player. So he elected to immobilize every last one of them first.

It wouldn't even matter if another wave of players came. Even if all ten-thousand players in Aincrad stormed this boss room together, he would stop them all.

He _would_ win.

It was a certainty.

When he finally arrived in front of the last remaining dozen-or-so players, he knew immediately that this battle in front of him was going to be the hardest one yet. While he had been dealing with Asuna, these players had taken some pretty extensive preparations in the meantime.

Kirito watched as the group finished affixing the forearm guards that had been distributed by one of the players, while he had been dealing with the girl. Apparently, there was a player here who had had a whole pile of them just sitting in his inventory, lying in wait for some reason, and so he had given them away to the other players in the area.

This new development would make it difficult for Kirito to take off their limbs and take them out of the battle, but it wasn't going to change the outcome in the end.

...And neither would the fact that they all started drinking potions a moment later, significantly boosting their stats.

Kirito wasn't the least bit concerned about it and charged into the fray without a second thought.

* * *

"Keep your fucking feet on the fucking ground like the rest of us you fucking hamster!"

Kirito performed another spin.

"Fuck!"

Kirito landed and found players on all sides of him once again.

"We got you now you son of a bitch!"

Kirito twirled through the air, dodging another spear thrust.

He was completely calm. He wasn't the slightest bit nervous at the fact that a dozen or so players were all attacking him simultaneously.

He was surrounded. And he counted five different attacks all on their way towards him at that very moment. All of which were in varying stages of preparation.

But that didn't matter to him either.

He had just dodged the first one―the spear. That meant there were four left.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

Still midair, Kirito gently tossed one of his swords with a behind-the-back wrist-flick and grabbed the shaft of the spear still thrusting through the air just underneath him with his newly freed up hand. He used it for a fraction of a second to guide himself over the weapon in a similar way that an Olympic high-jumper would over a bar, while his sword continued on its trajectory underneath it.

He went high, his sword went low.

Instead of landing on the back of his neck in a failed, half-backflip, however, he raised his newly emptied hand upwards―towards the ground relative to him―and prepared to land in a one-handed handstand.

The instant his fingers touched the ground he triggered a sword skill with his second sword―the one that he hadn't tossed. He was completely inverted but it didn't matter. Sword skills were relative and could be activated even upside down.

In a different context, the movement he did next probably would have looked like he was in the middle of a hardcore breakdancing routine, as he swung his whole body weight around in a flashy move that made his robe flutter in a super-dramatic, completely unintentional manner―his Rigid Cloak ability had been disabled to preserve his Global Hide Rate, so it routinely fluttered all over the place now.

But despite the flashiness of the move, it had been necessary in this instance. It allowed him to guide his triggered sword skill around to meet up with―and nail―the still falling blade that he had just tossed a moment ago.

He hit it with full force, and it sent this sword whipping through the air as if he had just smashed it with a golf club. There was a tremendous metallic clashing sound as the weapon was sent on its way at an extremely high speed.

The sword impaled a spear user. This one had been only a second or two away from landing a thrust, so Kirito had needed to take that player down. Impaling and sending him flying like this was his way of doing that.

This stopped the second attack in its tracks.

The instant his feet hit the ground, Kirito activated a hotkey and repositioned his empty arm over his right shoulder slightly behind him.

There was a slight delay whenever you activated a hotkey to pull out a weapon, but Kirito had taken this into account. So his arm was already in the proper position to block the next attack before the new sword had even started materializing in his hand.

As the sword began forming there was a _clang!_ as it performed the deflection.

...Then the particles of light solidified into the familiar shape and he found himself dual-wielding once again.

The process of a sword actually forming from particles of light was entirely cosmetic. So there was often a brief instant of time―a handful of frames―in which the system knew that the sword was there but that nobody else would be able to see it yet because the game hadn't rendered the graphics yet. He had taken advantage of this.

That blocked the third attack.

Having served its purpose, Kirito immediately threw the newly summoned sword at the fourth player that was currently trying to attack him―which happened to be a sword user. The thrown sword forced said player to cancel his attack and deflect the weapon instead―effectively removing him from the battle for the next five seconds or so.

That left only one attack left.

With his newly freed hand, Kirito grabbed the sword arm of the player that was still behind him―the player that had dished out attack number three―and he suddenly backed up into his guard.

This particular player was using both a sword and a shield, and Kirito needed that shield to stop the incoming fifth attack that he could see coming in his peripheral vision. But he still had about a second before it would land, so he still had loads of time.

Kirito elbowed the player behind him in the stomach and simultaneously twisted and swept both of his feet out from under him with a kick. Kirito kicked off the ground and activated a sword skill to initiate a spin, dragging the shield user into it with him. Instead of hitting the ground in a heap, they found themselves in midair at the exact moment when the two-handed warhammer user's attack arrived, and Kirito had just enough time to redirect the position of the shield by directing the player's arm into the flight path.

At that moment, both Kirito and the player he had dragged with him into the spin were sideways, in midair, and if one were to turn their head to get the perspective right, it would look like the player was giving Kirito a piggyback ride. Kirito was behind both the shield and the player, effectively forcing him to take the brunt of the impact.

Kirito could have thrown himself to the ground instead of pulling a crazy stunt like this to get out of the path of the attack completely, but that would not have allowed him to avoid the next series of incoming attacks. Attacks six through eleven were all on their way at that very moment. To dodge them all, he needed to get out of the middle of the group of players around him and the best way to do that was to tag along with the player he had pulled into the air as they were both sent flying like a baseball off of a home run swing.

And that was exactly what happened.

Kirito braced for the impact and then the warhammer blasted the shield dead on forcing it into the gut of the player carrying it and launching them both high into the sky. The warhammer user had mostly been swinging upwards with the attack, so they were sent on an extremely high, parabolic arc that would see them nearly three storeys in the air at the peak and with a ton of hangtime.

Kirito performed many tasks during the ensuing couple of seconds in which they were flying through the air. He opened up his menu, summoned both of the swords he had thrown earlier and put them away, removed both of the arms of the player he had dragged into the air with him at the elbows, and stole the player's shield.

Because the player didn't have arms anymore, he could not open his menu. You needed to have fingers in order to do the gesture that opened it. So without them, you were essentially locked out of your menu. This meant that the shield user could not summon the shield back anytime soon. So Kirito could 'borrow' the shield essentially for as long as he wanted to, at least until the player gained his limbs back. He would not receive all the bonuses for it since it wasn't considered equipped by the system, but he could still think of a few uses for it.

So he took it.

Kirito let go of the other player and, with a final backflip, landed silently, with a slight twirl and with all the grace of a cat.

The other player, on the other hand, face-planted into the ground a moment later and found himself in the oh-so-common display of ineptitude―the face-down, ass-up position.

Kirito immediately spun around in preparation for the next attack that he expected to be on its way only to stop upon noticing the fact that none of the other players were coming after him at the moment.

Underneath his mask, Kirito raised an eyebrow in confusion.

The players were just gaping at him in stunned amazement over what he had just done.

"Are you kidding me?!" someone broke the silence. "That is such horse shit!"

"Was that intentional?!"

"Yeah, it was intentional! He absolutely did that on purpose!"

"What the fuck?!"

"Right?!"

"This dude is nuts! Who thinks of something like that in the heat of the moment?! Oh, you're attacking me?! No worries! I'm just gonna use this guy right here as a sailboat and soar through the skies on his back to dodge! How does an idea like that even show up as a feasible option worth considering in someone's head?!"

"It's ridiculous!"

"How the fuck did he get through all that? He was completely surrounded on all sides!"

"There's a fucking hamster underneath that cloak, I'm telling you! That's what we're fighting! And they're sly motherfuckers!"

"Everyone, shut up!" a player shouted, trying to regain control over the situation. "We've still got ten of us left that can fight. We can still win if we work together and bring his health down a bit. If we can get him below half I should be able to paralyze him."

"Dude, we haven't hit him a single time yet," another player reminded him.

"We're getting closer though. I'm starting to get used to his movements. He's really tricky and spry, but I'm starting to understand."

"He's right," another player agreed. "The longer this battle goes on, the more likely it'll be that this guy makes a mistake. When he does, we'll get him. For now, just try not to lose any more limbs. Work together―and Prex, hold off on using your warhammer for a bit, okay?"

"Yeah, sorry about that…"

"Don't worry about it. Nobody knew that we were going to be fighting a doped up squirrel on a sugar rush here. Just be patient and wait for the right moment. I'll see if I can pin him down so you can get a big hit in."

The players immediately began to fan out and approach the orange player once again.

* * *

**A Few Minutes Earlier**

Asuna's lengthy process of rolling down the stairs came to an abrupt halt about thirty steps from the bottom.

She struck something solid and it completely stopped her in her tracks.

Grateful for the small reprieve, but confused nonetheless, she opened her eyes to look at whatever it was that she had hit. She knew by now―almost in her soul―exactly how much time it took for her to fall all the way down this particular set of stairs from the top and was confused as to why it had been cut slightly short.

So she investigated and her eyes widened at what she found.

Diabel had taken a seat in the middle of the stairs and she had just slammed into his back. This had caused her to wrap around him in the same way that a speeding car would upon smashing into a pole. He had fully absorbed her momentum and allowed her to finally stop her maddening tumble.

There were a few moments of awkward silence as she peeled herself off of the player's back.

…

"T-thanks," Asuna said, lightly blushing from the embarrassing manner in which she had encountered the other player.

"Don't worry about it," Diabel replied.

…

There were several more moments of awkward silence after that. Neither of them really knew how to start a conversation after everything that had happened.

"You just can't catch a break can you?" Diabel eventually asked. "This makes… what? Three times for you now?"

Asuna cringed.

"S-shut up. I would prefer it if you didn't remind me."

"I'm so sorry that you had to go through that," Diabel said.

To Asuna's surprise, he actually did sound genuinely apologetic.

"Thanks to you," Diabel continued, "I know exactly what that's like now, though. It really sucks. The stairs are just steep enough to prevent you from stopping yourself once you get going. If they had been just a little bit shallower then it wouldn't have been a problem."

Asuna rolled her eyes.

"Diabel… do you have any idea who you're talking to here? I'm literally an expert on this subject now. I know way more about this staircase than you ever will."

Diabel laughed.

"Right, right, sorry. I was just thinking aloud."

…

"Look, sorry for throwing you down here okay?" Asuna apologized. "It's just…"

"Don't worry about it. I had it coming," Diabel admitted. "Are we cool now, though?"

"Y-yeah."

"Good."

Diabel sat up and stretched.

"Let's go and throw that orange guy down next," he suggested.

"I don't think that's going to happen," Asuna replied.

Diabel raised an eyebrow.

"Why not? You don't want to get your revenge?"

To Diabel's surprise, rather than being filled to the brim with righteous fury, Asuna just looked… resigned now. The last vestiges of her anger and rage had finally been beaten out of her by the very same stone steps that they were currently seated upon.

"It's not that I don't want to, it's that I don't think we can."

"What are you talking about? By now, I'm sure he's probably already been defeated. He'll have been paralyzed and will be totally helpless."

Asuna furrowed her brow in confusion at just how out of touch Diabel seemed to be with the current situation.

"Definitely not," she replied.

Diabel frowned.

"What do you mean?"

"That person… he was holding back on us. When I was up there a few moments ago, not only was he holding his own against that entire group of players, he was beating them into the ground with ease. It's a completely lopsided battle and we need to get up there, right now, if we still want to win. It's going to take everything we've got."

"Are you serious?" Diabel sounded alarmed.

"Unfortunately, yes. That player is good. Extremely good. Far better than we thought. We need to get up there as soon as possible so we can help."

She stood up and started climbing up the stairs.

"Wait!" Diabel called after her.

Asuna turned and raised an eyebrow.

"I just sent a message a minute ago to a friend of mine that's got a really high Hiding level. He's an expert on the skill. I called him to see if he could get any sort of insight into this player and his abilities, but if what you said is true, we can take advantage of him when he gets here."

"How so?"

"He can Hide other players. He can turn us invisible as long as we stay close to him. From there, we'll be able to get the drop on this guy."

"When is he coming?"

"He'll be here in like…"

Diabel opened up his menu and checked something on his map.

"...Thirty seconds."

Asuna bit her lip and looked up to the top of the stairs in worry.

"Can you wait that long?" Diabel asked.

She considered the question carefully for several seconds before finally giving an answer.

"O-okay."

She sat back down and the two of them waited.

* * *

Sure enough, the player showed up about half a minute later.

Asuna wasn't the least bit surprised at what she saw when he arrived. The guy was in the exact same getup as the orange player. Almost, anyway. She couldn't see his face, he had his hood up, his body was completely concealed in a full-bodied cloak―the only real difference was the colour scheme. The orange player at the top of the stairs was wearing all black, while this player was wearing a lighter shade of brown.

"Thank God that you're here man," Diabel greeted the player. "We really need your help."

"I got that impression from your message," the player replied.

"It's worse than I realized, though. We need to move now. I'll explain while we go."

Diabel turned and started to run up the stairs. Both of the other players followed after him.

It took about a minute for Diabel to explain the situation to the new player and get him up to speed as the three of them ran up the stairs.

"So what is it that you want me to do now, then?" the player asked. "I won't be of much help in a fight."

"That's where you're wrong my slippery friend," Diabel disagreed. "All you have to do is hide us with that nifty ability of yours so we can get close to this guy. Then we'll leap out and attack him from behind when he isn't expecting it. He's in the middle of a battle with more than thirty players right now so it'll be easy to get the drop on him."

"That actually isn't true anymore," Asuna corrected.

Diabel turned to face her.

"What do you mean?"

"When I was last up there," she explained, "there were only about a dozen left standing. Everyone else had been taken out of the battle."

"What do you mean by 'taken out of the battle'?" Diabel asked, worryingly. "He didn't kill anyone did he?"

"No, no, nothing like that. He just chopped all their limbs off."

Diabel blinked in surprise.

"What?"

Out of all the things he had expected to hear, that wasn't among them.

"I'm serious. He started cutting off everyone's limbs and leaving them on the ground as limbless torsos. That way they couldn't move anymore until they heal. But by the time that they do…"

"...He'd have already won," Diabel finished. "Dammit! That's actually really clever. I hadn't thought of that."

"We're going to have to be careful. But not only that, I'm not too sure how effective I'm going to be up there. I'm not left-handed. And I don't know if either of you has noticed yet, but I'm actually currently missing an arm. My good arm. I've never tried using my rapier in my other hand like this."

During the run up the staircase, she had taken the time to summon the weapon back to her. But it was really awkward holding it in her left hand and she knew that she would not be very good with it, but she didn't have a choice.

"The two of you will probably have to do most of the work until I recover," she admitted with a wince.

She didn't like feeling so useless.

"That's okay," Diabel said. "We can still make that work."

Just as the three players reached the top of the staircase Diabel motioned for his friend to cloak the two of them in his camouflage.

"Just so you know, my Hide ability is not going to be very strong with both of you inside it. So we're going to have to move slowly so we don't make a lot of noise. Make sense?"

It was also the case that they needed to stand really close together since the range on it was so short. It only extended a couple of feet outwards.

"Yeah," Diabel replied.

"Let's do it then."

The ability activated and the three players disappeared from view.

From inside the range of the ability, there wasn't much that changed. The three players received a slight tint to their vision as confirmation that they were indeed inside the range of the ability and were currently affected by it, but not much else.

They walked up the final few steps of the staircase and looked over the top to where the battle was taking place.

All three players collectively dropped their jaws.

Because the sight that greeted them there was sheer insanity.

It was the highest intensity combat that any of them had ever seen before. The orange player finished performing a ridiculous sequence of spins before being surrounded and attacked from all sides.

Then they all got a front-row seat as the player deflected or dodged every incoming attack, was fired high into the air with a warhammer, dragged another player along for the ride, and then did a couple of flips and landed without a scratch on him.

"Holy fuck," Diabel's friend cursed. "What the hell was that?"

Diabel grimaced.

He now understood exactly what Asuna had been talking about. The ridiculous abilities of this player were going to be problematic to deal with, to say the least.

"How the hell are we going to sneak up on a player that can do shit like that?" Diabel asked rhetorically.

"I told you," Asuna said, "Nothing this guy does makes sense."

After watching the orange player land on the ground and the battle come to a momentary pause as a result, from the safety of their shared camouflage, Diabel started brainstorming.

"Okay, we're going to need a new plan. Listen up, you two. Here's what we're going to do…"

* * *

There were eleven players still standing against him, and as far as Kirito was concerned, they consisted of two types.

Almost all of the players that didn't have much PvP experience had already been taken out of the battle. Kirito had deliberately targeted them first to reduce the total number of opponents as much as possible.

However, he hadn't been able to get rid of _all_ of the noobs yet due to a minor annoyance. A couple of them had been wearing moderately thick armour over their arms by total coincidence, and Kirito had not been able to cut through it very easily. So as Kirito had been chopping off everyone's limbs, this small group of players had managed to make the cut by luck. So there were a few of them around still.

Everyone else, though, had a decent amount of combat experience and did not fall for any of the simple-minded traps that had caught all the weaker players.

So those were the two groups. Lucky noobs with good armour, and skilled players―some with good armour, and some that were just skilled enough to evade all his attacks.

As the battle had progressed and the number of his opponents had decreased, Kirito had found that the difficulty of the battle paradoxically increased over time for a few different reasons. The first was that the average experience level of this group of enemies increased as the weakest were removed from it. The experience distribution skewed and so the average opponent became more challenging to defeat.

The other main reason for the increase in difficulty was the fact that with the reduction in the total number of players, there was suddenly more open space for these stronger players to move around in.

Many of Kirito's opponents―the strongest ones among them―had taken to sitting back and observing as Kirito battled the weaker players. As they slowly dropped to the ground though―limbless―one at a time, the stronger players suddenly had more room to move around in as there were fewer people getting in their way.

This counterintuitive concept was the reason why Kirito made the prediction that the difficulty of the battle would actually only peak once he had around five opponents remaining. It would increase steadily until then, and drop off after.

But just because that was when the battle would be at its most difficult didn't mean for a second that Kirito wouldn't be able to win it in the end.

He still wasn't even close to being worried. Because it was still beyond clear to him that he was going to win.

He just knew.

It was only a matter of time.

His opponents had slowly adapted over time to his spins. They had started to get used to the way he was currently using them, anyway. If he wanted to, he could still easily tear through the whole remaining group with them, but only if he started using them with the intent to kill. All this time, he had only been targeting exposed limbs and using them to immobilize instead. So if he dropped this restraint on himself they would be no match for them. But because he didn't want to do that, his spins were becoming less and less effective at achieving his goals, so he needed a new strategy.

This meant that Kirito ended up in a bit of a strange situation for a few moments. He knew that he was going to win the fight―he had decided that he was never going to lose at anything ever again, after all, and this counted―but he didn't quite know the details on how he was going to do that yet.

He was curious.

What was he about to do to regain the edge?

Kirito looked down at the sword in his right hand for a moment or two before suddenly getting an idea.

He started to chuckle.

The players suddenly stopped their cautious, slow advance.

"This guy is up to something everyone, be careful!"

Each of the players had all of their attention focused on Kirito like a laser, and they all now had disturbed looks on their faces after seeing him start to laugh.

"I didn't sign up for this shit," a player complained.

Kirito grinned under his mask and suddenly opened up his menu. He spent the next several seconds as the players slowly surrounded him again and advanced, building and setting up a new hotbar. As his potion engine was not useful in his current situation, and neither were any armour switches―as DPS was not the focus―he switched out this normal setup for a new one that cleared everything he didn't need out and replaced every newly freed up slot with a weapon.

Many of his Anneal Blades had different tiers of upgrades on them, so they were technically classified as separate items now even though, under normal circumstances, items of the same name stacked in the inventory.

But they didn't have the same names anymore. Some were Anneal Blade +8's, and others were +6's, etc. So most of them took up different slots on his hotbar now, so to have easy access to all of them, he had needed to clear up a lot of space.

When he was done, he looked at his newly stolen shield in his left hand―the one he had taken from that player he had dragged into the air.

...He didn't actually need the thing anymore, he realized. He had picked it up before coming up with this plan, just in case, but it would only slow him down now. So he carelessly tossed the thing behind him.

Without the shield, all he had in his hands now was a single sword. He tossed it back and forth between his hands a few times before settling on keeping it in his right hand for the time being.

Then he started walking forwards with it.

"Here he comes!"

A one-handed sword and shield user stepped in front of the slowly advancing orange player and prepared to meet the incoming attack head-on. Three other players backed him up and settled into their own defensive stances right behind him.

Kirito slowly started rotating his wrist, before suddenly flicking it, causing his sword to start rapidly spinning around in his grip like a helicopter blade.

A rapid, periodic whooshing sound filled the air and continued as he walked forward.

When a player used the same weapon for such a long period of time, they would eventually begin to get an extremely good understanding of its balance and weight distribution. When this happened, and when you gave a player like that a lot of free time, sometimes they would find themselves just… fucking around with their weapon out of boredom. Spinning it, tossing it around, doing mindless tricks with it―it was a totally useless skill to learn when it came to actually winning important battles against a boss or a monster, but it was one that was usually learned anyway by extremely high-levelled players that for one reason or another decided to put in the time.

Kirito was one such player. Back in the beta, he had picked up the Fishing skill for no particular reason other than passing curiosity. So, he had spent hours sitting next to lakes and ponds, waiting for a bite, with nothing to do but fuck around with his sword and carelessly spin and toss it around.

He wasn't the only player that did this by any means. And he was certainly not the best at it. There was this whole niche community of players that practiced endlessly and came up with techniques and borderline dance routines with their weapons that were meant to be visually appealing―not applicable. Oftentimes, these players wouldn't even battle anything. They'd just record themselves doing crazy shit and then post it on the internet.

It was just like what you saw in sports. There were the professional players that you saw in actual matches, and then there were the guys on YouTube that displayed incredible tricks that nobody would ever see during the middle of a game.

It was the same in SAO. There were front line players, and there were trickers.

Kirito was making use of that mindless training time of his―if it could even be called that―and the superhuman strength and dexterity of his avatar now, as he kept his sword spinning at a speed that was impossible to achieve in the real world.

There was a multiphase routine to it―one that could only be understood after hours upon hours of mindless practice to get the subtleties down. It'd spin on his palm for a second or two, but it would not remain balanced for long like that. The spin was intrinsically unstable for complicated physics reasons that he didn't understand and the blade would fall to the ground unless he rotated his wrist in a particular way. The spin processed, and he had to turn his hand over mid-spin so that the handle of the sword ended up rotating over the back of his hand and his knuckles. This would allow it to stabilize for a few seconds more, but then he'd have to turn his hand back over again to keep the spin going. And all throughout this process, he was having to flick each of his fingers in a highly precise, subtle way, so that the sword didn't lose any of its net rotational momentum.

All in all, it was an intricate, highly complicated routine that could only be understood by a player that had put in hours of time developing it through trial and error, and who had a deep instinctual understanding of the balance of their weapon.

It helped immensely the fact that Kirito had spent so much time using the Anneal Blade in particular. Out of all the swords he had ever used in his time in the game―including in the beta―he had spent the most time with that weapon, so he was most familiar with it.

He could do what he was doing now with other one-handed swords, but since the balance was slightly different on every weapon, he wouldn't be as good at it if he tried. He was most familiar with the Anneal Blade and because of the fact that the particular upgrades he had on all of his from a Blacksmith did not change anything about their weight or balance, he had not needed to relearn how to use them afterwards.

In any case, Kirito was now glad that he had put in this practice time because he had just figured out how to weaponize this seemingly useless concept.

Kirito could get the blade moving impressively quickly. Every tenth of a second or so, the blade would make a full rotation and there would be a whooshing sound loud enough to be heard all around the room. And the sounds were so rapid that they blended together.

It sounded as if someone had taken a rope or a piece of cable and was now whirling it around over their head in a rapid circle―only it was amplified a bit due to his superhuman strength.

Kirito had put in so much practice that he could do this without much thought at all. It was instinctive and second nature. And to top it all off, he had so thoroughly mastered the subtleties of this and many other related tricks, that he could do it without any wasted movements whatsoever.

He was not struggling to keep the blade spinning and there was a stark, visual contrast between himself and his weapon. He was calmly walking forwards at a casual pace, hardly making any movements at all… and then his sword was whipping out of control at a ridiculous rate of speed.

It made for a strangely captivating yet intimidating sight.

And he could do this all day.

"W-what the hell is this guy doing, now?" a player complained, a look of complete disbelief on his face at what he was seeing.

"Why couldn't we have had a normal opponent?" someone else asked.

"Oi!" a third player shouted. "Squirrel-boy! Are you here to fight, or prance around like a fairy princess?!"

Kirito took one final step before crouching low to the ground.

' _Traditional sword fighting… isn't for me.'_

He bolted forwards abruptly, keeping the spin of his sword going all along.

"Shit!"

In his current mindset, Kirito did not yet understand the limits of his own capabilities. This was the first time he had ever had full access to his maximum potential and was perfectly in control of it. So, wanting to test himself to his full extent, Kirito planned on developing a brand new, horrendously informal sword style right at that moment, as he was battling this group of players.

He didn't once consider how monumental that task actually was or whether or not he could actually do it.

Because he would do it.

In fact, as far as he was concerned, he already had. Everything that was about to happen was all preordained.

He had noticed a weakness in these players. This group of intermediate players was really good at defending against and reacting to textbook attacks that were standard everywhere. They knew how to block any common sword skill well enough to stop Kirito from tearing through them in a handful of seconds like he had earlier with the novice players. They were at the stage of development in which they knew how to defend against anything one would reasonably expect in a duel. His spins had thrown them for a bit, but they knew how to dodge them for the most part now. At the very least, they could more or less prevent the loss of their limbs. But they did not know how to properly react to bizarre, underhanded combat tactics, so by rapidly developing a sword style that centred around those, Kirito would be able to tear these players apart with ease.

But, here was the thing about doing battle in this way. There was no sword skill support. He couldn't use them for obvious reasons. They were predictable, and that meant that these players would be able to defend themselves against them. So doing battle like this, without using them, came with a significant DPS cut. And this was the primary reason why nobody but the most insane of PvPers had ever tried fighting like this. It was massively inefficient and a gigantic waste of time.

But this was only true if a player was trying to do damage at all.

This was not Kirito's current goal. He needed to paralyze these players by taking off their limbs. He didn't care about doing actual damage to them. In fact, the less damage he dished out, the better.

The reduced DPS was a feature, not a bug.

What he needed was to take everyone off guard. And the best way he could see doing that was to throw out all the rules. He butchered his own stance and started to move more like a wild animal than an experienced swordsman. He took shameless advantage of his Acrobatics skill and the AGI gap between himself and the rest of the players due to the difference in their levels and closed the distance to the closest player in only a few seconds.

This first player that he reached… didn't have a clue on how to react to an attack like this, so he elected to just hide behind his shield.

Kirito immediately threw himself to the floor as fast as possible at the last moment and caught his sword in a reverse grip. Then, with a twirling motion, he swung out with it as far as he could reach and took off one of the player's exposed legs.

Raising his shield had been a mistake, and Kirito had capitalized on it.

Then he slapped the ground with his palm and rose to his feet just in time to dodge the counter attacks from the next few players.

He decided to dodge as much as possible rather than to parry or deflect, even if it meant he was moving way more than he needed to. Then he focused his attention on a single target at a time.

He heard the player behind him curse and collapse to the ground, unable to handle his newly lost leg and Kirito stopped paying him any more attention, intent on finishing him off later. Instead, he changed his targets to another sword and shield user.

Kirito leaped at him and started swinging wildly.

The player was able to block everything with only some difficulty, but he failed to notice the fact that Kirito's wild swings were actually being calculated out with extreme precision in order to manipulate his stance.

The other player parried another one of Kirito's attacks and tried to counterattack immediately after, but froze, eyes wide in astonishment at what happened next.

Kirito had released his sword the instant it had been parried, causing it to fly out from his grip, leaving him seemingly unarmed.

However, the sword continued on its path behind his back and landed straight into his opposite hand in a reverse grip a moment later. All it took then was a slight rotation and he had completely bypassed the shield user's guard.

He slashed off one of the player's arms at the shoulder, taking his shield with it. With the rest of the player's body exposed after that, it took only a second for the rest of his three limbs to come flying off afterwards.

A player attacked Kirito from behind.

Kirito threw his sword to his other hand and blocked the attack.

That was another thing that these players seemed to fail to understand. Even though they knew that Kirito could dual-wield, for some reason, when he had put away one of his swords, they almost seemed to forget about that fact. At any time, Kirito could just switch his weapon to his other hand because he was ambidextrous and could use it just as easily there.

He could perform any given attack from either hand just as well.

...And he started to take advantage of it.

He began to dual-wield with a single sword. He'd unleash an attack with one hand before tossing his weapon to the other hand and continuing with that one. Because of the fact that he had a higher STR stat than everyone else in the area, he could block attacks with only a single hand―even two-handed attacks. If a player was in front of him, and a player was behind him, and if both were attacking him at once, Kirito would not have to completely rotate his body back and forth to deal with both players. He could just toss his sword back and forth between hands and turn his body so that both players were coming at him from his sides.

With the added confusion thrown into the equation by filling every spare moment by rapidly spinning and twirling his sword in an extremely janky-looking manner, he was able to create a lot of distance between the players trying to attack him from behind, and made a lot of opportunities for himself.

Kirito slashed a shield in front of him as hard as he could with his blade. The strike was stopped completely, but the other player was knocked slightly off-balance due to the fact that Kirito had put so much force behind it.

Then, Kirito abruptly tossed his sword to his opposite hand to deflect a spear coming from that side.

...Then he immediately threw it back to his right side again, but added a half-spin to the weapon, catching it upside down.

When he grabbed his weapon, blade first, and then promptly swung it like a baseball bat as hard as he possibly could, striking with the handle and using it as a club and completely twisting his body into the motion, he caught everybody off-guard.

He inflicted a small amount of damage on himself due to grabbing his own weapon by the sharp side, but this was worth it, as it allowed him to hook the side of the shield in front of him using the cross-guard and half-pry―half-smash―it out of his way. His own sword completely shattered during the process, having not been designed to be used even remotely like that, but he didn't care. The weapon had been getting pretty low on durability anyway and he had more than enough money to replace it. Also, he had a ton of backups ready on his hotbar to take its place.

Another sword would be in his hand in only a few moments―he had just activated the hotkey to bring it out.

In the meantime, he jumped and planted both of his feet on the chest of the off-balance shield-user in front of him, double-kicking him and knocking him over. Kirito landed on top of the guy and used his newly summoned sword to free the player of his arms.

And then there were eight. Eight more players that Kirito had to deal with.

Well… eight and a half. The ninth player was only missing a single leg and had since figured out how to hobble around. But Kirito didn't see him as much of a threat at all like that, needless to say.

Kirito looked down at his hands again.

He was beginning to get the hang of it. This new style of combat… But he hadn't perfected it yet. He still needed a bit more experience with it first.

The hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood up. On a seemingly complete whim, Kirito abruptly leaned far off to the side and turned, only to see a sword come out of nowhere and Diabel to phase into existence along with another player.

The blade passed right through where his back had been a mere moment ago.

Kirito's facial expression didn't change whatsoever. His instincts had actually given him much more of a heads up than necessary, and he could have dodged far later than he had. He definitely wasn't surprised. Because nothing was capable of stopping him as he was, least of all Diabel.

' _I don't lose anymore.'_

A fraction of a second later, Kirito's left hand wrapped around Diabels' overextended wrist. He tugged the other player to the side, and kicked out his legs, causing him to trip and fall.

"Are you kidding me?!" Diabel loudly complained as he toppled onto the ground. "How the hell did you see that coming?! I was invisible!"

Kirito ignored him and focused on the second player that had arrived during the ambush.

Just like him, this second player clearly specialized in the Hiding skill as well and so Kirito could not see his face due to that player's Mask ability.

Rather than leap into action and prepare as fast as he possibly could for this new player's incoming attack, however, Kirito deliberately moved as slowly as possible to throw off the rhythm. He slowly raised his sword into a position to block the incoming second player's attack―moving only just fast enough to get his sword there in time.

With a battle cry, the player that had concealed Diabel during his surprise attack activated a sword skill and thrust forwards with his dagger in order to meet Kirito's sword.

When the blades clashed, Kirito let go. His sword was sent flying out of his hand once again, at a frightening speed.

He had deliberately slackened his grip on it so that it would do so. All of the power behind the sword skill that the dagger-user had just used was now behind Kirito's flying sword.

However, at the last moment, Kirito had curved his hand so that the blade would deflect off of his palm, ever so slightly changing the trajectory. So, instead of his sword flying off in a random direction and missing everyone in the area, it flew a little off to the right and impaled a spear user trying to sneak up on him from behind, through the stomach.

' _I can see everything.'_

Without the slightest hesitation whatsoever, Kirito continued as if his sword had never been in his hand at all. He had planned on losing it and had actually been intending on using the dagger he had just pulled out from his sleeve to attack the player with instead, the whole time.

Kirito caught the other dagger user's hand with his own, newly freed one, and stabbed the player in the stomach with his dagger, impaling him on the blade.

The player reached down to grab at Kirito's hand in shock.

Then Kirito punched him in the face, and kicked his legs out from under him, exactly as he had done to Diabel a moment earlier.

The player collapsed onto the ground, dagger still impaled in his gut, and Kirito continued standing, completely unphased.

' _I've already won.'_

A moment later, there was another sword in his hand and he was looking for his next target.

* * *

Kirito completely zoned out for the next thirty seconds or so. Throughout that entire period, he was in the middle of a fierce battle but he found himself barely paying any attention to it anymore.

He just kept reaching down further and further into the abyss of power within himself and it kept on giving more and more.

' _How deep does it go?'_

On the outside, he suddenly stopped moving around. He didn't feel the need to flip or fly around the battlefield in a flashy show of acrobatics any longer.

He planted both of his feet and stood there, staring at his empty left hand.

Then he lowered it to his side.

' _I don't need it anymore.'_

His right hand was enough.

The remaining players immediately surrounded him, but he couldn't find it in himself to care.

One sword covered every direction at once in a spinning defence. The only thing he paid any attention to was his grip on his weapon.

It was odd. He had never held a sword the way he was now. Instead of holding it in a clenched, solid, unbreakable fist, it was instead open, relaxed, and loose. And he was almost 'clawing' the handle. Or pinching it―relying on his finger strength instead of the support from his palm.

It wasn't something that he had intentionally tried to do, but it had developed naturally as he had tried to get his sword to move faster and faster.

It came down to the differences between this game world and the real world. The strength in his avatar's fingers was far greater than any human's. So was the rest of his virtual body for that matter. As a result of this, what was possible to do with a sword in this world was simply different. Vastly so.

This wasn't the real world, where everyone's physical bodies were roughly equal in strength and had hard limits built into them.

Kirito had known all this time, at least mentally, that this was the case, but this was perhaps the first time he was understanding it on a truly deep level.

There was no reason to follow the common-sense views brought over from the real world on how to hold and use a weapon because that knowledge wasn't necessarily applicable here. Real martial arts, including Kendo and the like, had been designed for use by a human, in a human body, with human strengths and weaknesses. It was really good in that narrow situation, but when the rules changed, it failed to keep up with what Kirito needed to do. Rigid stances were too slow for him in this new world, and so he had to make up his own rules.

Real martial arts of all types were going to need extensive revisions and modifications to remain relevant in virtual battles.

This was yet another example.

Since there were no known techniques that allowed a sword user to defend against ten people coming at him from all sides, he was forced to invent one.

His STR stat was significantly higher than everyone else's and he made use of that fact. He didn't need all the strength of his hand to stop an attack. A few fingers on the handle of his weapon was enough to support his weapon during a deflection or a parry against one of the low-level players around him. So when he changed the grip on his sword to allow him to put in the minimum amount of strength necessary to block each blow, his hand naturally curled, and his sword moved closer and closer to his fingertips.

But then this had a side effect. The rest of his hand was opened up. Without the ironclad grip on the weapon that he was used to, all of a sudden, a huge variety of movement possibilities opened up before him.

This gave him a huge boost in the mobility of his sword. He could manipulate it far faster and with far more subtlety with his fingertips than he could when he had a standard vice-grip on it.

He began spinning his weapon between his fingers.

That summed up what he was doing at that moment most succinctly. Spinning his sword between his fingers, and only gripping it solidly enough to prevent these weaker players from knocking it out of his hands and using no more force than that.

And then as he delved deeper and deeper within himself, he took it one step further.

He did not need to grip the sword at all except in the brief instants of time in which he needed to parry, or when he needed to attack. Just those tiny fractions of a second, separated by long, drawn-out moments of nothing. All throughout the rest of that time, putting in just enough strength to prevent his sword from falling under the influence of gravity, and stopping it from falling out of his hand was enough. And that took almost nothing at all.

It was in that moment, wrist awkwardly curled, and directing his wildly spinning sword to deflect all attacks at once that he understood the final missing piece to his new fighting style.

' _I need a lighter sword.'_

His current one was too large and clunky to allow for the sort of unrealistically deft movements that he was trying to get it to do. It just couldn't keep up with him. He could manage with it, but it was needlessly difficult to do so. He needed the right tool for the job, so a smaller sword was required. But he also needed the blade itself to be roughly the same length―just thinner―so that he could still use all of his techniques with it.

He glanced around the room at the other players and noticed that one of them―in the distance―was carrying around a chokuto.

Kirito's eyes locked onto that player like a laser.

' _Yours will do_.'

The sound of his sword whirling all around him and defending against attacks from all sides sounded like someone was firing a machine gun at a sheet of steel, such was the rapidity of the weapon clashes.

Kirito suddenly let go of his weapon mid-swing and carelessly cast it aside like a child would with a broken toy. It went clattering off somewhere in the distance, leaving him completely unarmed.

Five players took that opportunity to try and land a hit.

...Every single one of them missed.

None of them had been able to follow what exactly happened during that moment of time but the next thing they knew, their target was outside of their group entirely and was no longer surrounded. The orange player's hands were in the pockets of his cloak, and he was casually closing the distance to the player with the chokuto, having completely bypassed and ignored them.

"Don't look down on us!"

A player suddenly charged at the orange player's unprotected back and activated a sword skill.

Kirito dropped his gaze to the floor as he continued walking, and spotted that player's shadow.

The interior of the boss room was brighter than the dungeon outside it, and since the door to that room was still wide open, the light from within was streaming out. This light cast the player's shadow on the floor in a spot where Kirito could easily see it. So he knew exactly what the player was trying to do without having to turn around.

With an encyclopedic knowledge of every one-handed sword skill that existed in the game up to around level one-hundred or so, he didn't even feel the need to turn around. He knew all the sword-skill timings and decided that he didn't need to use anything except his ears and the movements of the shadow on the floor to dodge all the attacks.

He listened for the sound of a sword skill activating, and identified which one it was based on the shape of the shadow. That told him everything he needed in order to determine the exact trajectory of the blade, allowing him to dodge it.

These players were still too dependent on using the system to assist them, and this made them extremely predictable.

He was going to teach them that lesson now.

Kirito began swaying side to side as he continued his walk, hands still in his pockets, avoiding each attack from behind him with the barest possible of margins.

The player behind him launched sword-skill after sword-skill but every single one of them missed the target.

The player with the chokuto that Kirito had spotted earlier was busy tending to one of the downed players and finally looked up upon seeing his approach.

A terrified expression quickly settled on his face.

Something about seeing an enemy totally disregard one of his attackers and casually walk straight towards him sent chills down his spine.

The player gripped his chokuto, pushed aside his fear and charged, hoping to land a hit.

The idea made sense in his mind. The orange player was still being attacked from behind so there was no way he'd be able to handle both of them at once.

But the reality was different.

At the last moment, Kirito spun around, grabbed the wrist of the player still wildly swinging behind him, summoned his dagger, pried the sword out of the player's hand with it, caught it, then spun back around with the new weapon and slashed the arm of the player with the chokuto right off.

It had been a blurred, whirling movement that had all taken place in under a second.

Kirito caught the chokuto out of the air and used this new weapon to liberate its original owner from the rest of their limbs. Then he threw what was left of that player's body aside and turned back around to face the other guy that had been attacking him from behind all this time.

"You bastard!" the player roared at him.

...But Kirito wasn't very threatened by it, seeing as the player wasn't currently holding a weapon.

' _Stand aside.'_

In a movement almost twice as fast as his last one, Kirito's new chokuto ripped through that player's limbs in less than a second, and he quickly found himself walking back over to the rest of the group of players he had been battling earlier on.

* * *

' _This is much better.'_

Even with the debuff to his damage output due to the fact that the weapon he was using didn't actually belong to him, the newfound maneuverability of it put him on a completely new level.

He could finally move as he had envisioned and the only thing that was slowing him down now were his current avatar's stats. But he couldn't do anything about those yet. One thing was sure, though. Once he increased them, he knew that he would be able to move much, much faster than he was. As fast as he was now, he was nowhere near the limit of his reaction time. His body was the bottleneck, not his mind.

Dual-wielding with his old swords was still a lot better in terms of damage output, but in this niche PvP situation where he needed to move extremely fast and unpredictably, and take off limbs rather than go for kills, the chokuto was way more useful, even when he couldn't use sword skills with it.

But he didn't have to pull his punches to prevent any deaths while he was using it since it did so little damage, and it was a lot easier to suddenly change the blade's direction.

It was so much lighter and because of that, Kirito had been slightly concerned at first that he would have to spend a ton of time getting used to the thing. But he had underestimated himself. It had only taken him a few seconds, in the end, to get used to the new weight and balance.

He hadn't perfectly mastered all the intricacies with it nearly as well as he had with his Anneal Blade yet, of course―as that would take time―but he was more than good enough with it now to accomplish what he wanted to.

Kirito shredded through the entire rest of the group in seconds. The group of players that he had been painstakingly battling all this time―slowly whittling down their numbers―had been completely eviscerated in only a few moments with his chokuto.

There were only four players left standing now and they were all in another standoff. Diabel, and a few other randoms that Kirito didn't know, were his final opponents.

Spotting the thick armour that Diabel was wearing, Kirito decided to do one last thing before lunging forwards to start the battle anew.

He placed his new chokuto between his teeth, bit down on the blade to keep it there, and summoned two more of his swords.

He didn't care that it made him look like a dog carrying a bone because he had a purpose for doing so.

He was going to swap between dual-wielding and his new chokuto as needed. But without the ability to hotkey that chokuto since it couldn't be placed in his inventory due to it not being his, and without a sheath to hold it, he'd have to keep it in his mouth instead if he wanted to have quick access to it.

* * *

The battle that proceeded was without a doubt the fastest, most intense PvP battle that had ever occurred in the game's history up until that point.

Kirito's earlier prediction had been accurate. This final group of players consisted of the most skilled among the lot of them.

Diabel wasn't the weakest one there, but he wasn't the strongest either. And one of these guys in particular―the strongest one― _really_ seemed to know what he was doing. He was clearly a PvP specialist.

The other limbless players spectating on the sidelines could only look on in stunned amazement.

"Holy shit!"

"Who the hell are these guys?!"

There was still a noticeable skill gap. Kirito was dual-wielding and could dish out attacks faster than all four of them combined. But the remaining players were working together and trying to attack him from all sides. And at first, this seemed to balance it out.

The battle continued in its rapid intensity for about twenty seconds before Kirito finally understood their fighting styles and began tearing them apart.

He created an opening, reversed the grip on the sword in his right hand, and initiated a spin, chokuto still in his teeth. He whipped through the air, targeting the weakest of the four. He unleashed a multi-hit sword skill that finished with an incredibly precise strike that took off the player's left arm just above where his forearm guard came to an end, bypassing the armour.

Having expected something like this, the other three players took advantage of Kirito's newly exposed back. Because he had unleashed a sword skill, they knew that he would be forced into cooldown and would be unable to retaliate.

...Having expected this, however, Kirito bypassed that cooldown by unleashing a skill with his other hand, suddenly reversing his direction on a dime.

Skill connecting.

At no point did his mind even consider how absolutely puny the timing window was, or how experimental and untested the technique was. He just knew that it would work.

He had already won the battle.

Of course, the skill would work. Because he had decided that he was never going to miss with one ever again. This was simply a fact that the universe would obey as far as he was concerned.

He was never going to lose again.

Seeing the fact that the player he had targeted with the sudden reversal was skilled enough to freeze and raise his guard despite the seeming impossibility of the counterattack, Kirito took note that that player was the biggest threat against him, and translated his skill downwards toward the ground, forcing him into a wonky backspin. He reversed the grip on his off-hand sword once again and reached over the guard of the player―targeting the top of his shoulder in a completely formless attack.

The player began twisting to the side to sidestep, but Kirito had anticipated this. So he stuck to his original plan and diverted to his right at the last moment, targeting the player off to the side instead.

His attack had been a diversion.

Taken completely off guard, this new player was unable to stop the fifteen-hit, skill-connected combo that saw all four of his limbs removed and the rest of his body thrown off to the side with considerable force.

It was the first time that Kirito had ever succeeded in getting the timing for that particular combo down. He had theory-crafted it some time ago, but not once throughout all his training sessions in the past had he ever successfully pulled it off.

Now it was obvious to him how to do it.

The remaining combat-capable players landed and reset their positions.

"How the hell did he do that?!" one of the players laying on the ground off to the side shouted.

"That was a dual-wielding sword skill!"

"Hacks! I call hacks!"

"Bastard," the player that Kirito had removed the arm of earlier on spoke, clutching his stump. "Who the hell are you?"

"You're strong," player number one―the strongest among the lot―mumbled to himself.

The players had another momentary standoff before Kirito suddenly broke it with a Sonic Leap.

The battle started up once again.

Kirito targeted the player with the missing arm first, as he was the weakest. Unable to defend himself properly, the player was steamrolled in a matter of seconds.

This simplified the battle once again and turned it into a two-on-one.

But it was only superficially so. As Diabel found himself completely outclassed and unable to keep up with the two remaining players, and so he quickly found himself on the sidelines, watching as the two strongest players he had ever seen started duelling.

* * *

"These guys are unreal! Why haven't I ever heard of either of them?!"

"Why are you asking me? I don't know."

"The orange player I can understand. He's an absolute demon. But who the hell is this other guy that's fighting him? This dude was just hanging out in the background with us this whole time?! Why wasn't he leading the raid?!"

"Dude, half the people here are hiding their names. There are probably a ton of incredible people here that just don't want to draw any attention."

"One thing's for sure, though. These two both have to be beta testers. Nobody could possibly get this skilled so quickly otherwise."

They continued to watch as the duel raged on, their collective jaws agape.

"Look! He's keeping up with him!"

"Dude, did you see how many potions that guy chugged down earlier? This orange guy hasn't taken any yet. So while they are probably evenly matched in terms of raw stats at the moment, the instant that potion timer runs out, it's over."

"Dude, what battle are you watching?" another limbless torso interjected. "These guys aren't even close to being evenly matched. The orange dude is all over this guy. He's in complete control of the pace of the battle and it's taking the other dude everything he has to not get destroyed in an instant."

The other limbless spectators took a closer look.

"Shit, he's right."

"Fuck."

Abruptly, the orange player switched weapons to the chokuto still in his teeth, and ended the battle, slashing off all four of the other player's limbs in a blur.

"Are you shitting me? This guy just beat every single one of us single-handedly."

The collective mood of all the remaining torsos became downtrodden.

"Not everyone, yet," one hopeful individual pointed out. "Look."

The spectators noticed at that moment that there was still one player on their side left standing. The leader of the raid group himself.

Diabel.

The orange player turned to face him, the last remaining player capable of movement standing in his way.

Diabel took a look around the room.

There were more than forty players there. Of them, the only two who had any functioning limbs at all were himself and the orange player before him. Every last remaining player other than them had had all of their limbs amputated.

He looked back at the orange player and chuckled nervously.

He had not expected things to turn out like this.

"You sure love taking off people's limbs, huh?" he asked. "At least you're not a PKer. That would have sucked. You'd have killed all the best players in the game right here and nobody ever would have made it out of this world alive."

Kirito didn't respond.

Diabel's grin faded and a serious expression settled on his face.

"But I'm not going to give up."

Diabel readied his sword in a heroic stance and aimed it at the orange player.

"Come at me with nothing held back and I'll do the same. Let's make this a fight to remember."

Diabel suddenly lunged and the final battle began.

* * *

Kirito was actually almost disappointed. When he was in his current state of mind, battling was pointless. He already knew how it would end.

But rather than finish it in an instant, Kirito wanted to use this opportunity to truly unleash his maximum potential. Something about what Diabel had said stuck with him. About making this moment something to remember.

He wanted to utterly destroy this group of players on every level. He wanted them all to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they had no chance against him.

So he gave himself a challenge.

He put a time limit on himself. He would end the battle in less than ten seconds.

...But the real hard part about the challenge was that he was going to pull it off without even touching his opponent. Their swords would not make contact and neither would they. He would lay his opponent out on his ass without contact.

Kirito abruptly lowered his swords and, with a pair of gestures, they vanished.

Diabel's eyes widened, but he continued his assault.

Kirito started dodging side to side as Diabel started swinging, subtly manipulating the other player's feet by carefully spacing out each dodge.

When the other player landed in the exact position Kirito had been waiting for, Kirito abruptly surged forward with a punch.

Diabel leaned back and dodged it completely, exactly as Kirito had expected him to.

Having anticipated this, Kirito abruptly pulled out a hotkeyed throwing knife with his opposite hand and tossed it on a precise trajectory towards Diabel's right foot.

Again, the other player dodged it completely by sliding that foot back by a couple of inches.

Having anticipated this as well, Kirito deliberately waited about three-quarters of a second to throw off the rhythm of the battle the tiniest amount before pulling out the chokuto from between his teeth and hurling it right past Diabel's shoulder.

The player was forced to lean ever so slightly to the side.

This completed all of Kirito's planned manipulations of the other player's stance, so he pulled out a dagger, lowered his center of gravity, and suddenly lunged forwards.

...But he slammed on the brakes halfway and slid to a stop.

Because the battle was over in that moment.

Kirito had carefully manipulated Diabel's balance and center of gravity with several unbelievably precise movements and, by throwing himself forwards at the last moment in the way he had, he had forced Diabel to move according to his instincts. However, due to the awkward stance he had been manipulated into in advance, this had actually worked against him. Diabel's muscles had tensed, and this had thrown him off balance causing him to stumble and trip.

Diabel landed on his ass and was now staring up at him in astonishment.

Ankle-breaking.

It was a technique that was so unbelievably advanced that nobody had ever actually figured out how to perform it intentionally during a battle. It happened every now and then during a duel, occasionally, but it always happened by accident when it did.

Until now.

Because Kirito just knew how to do it now. In his current mindset, the concept had simply been intuitive to understand. It had taken up a huge amount of his focus and concentration to pull off, and those seemingly careless weapon tosses in particular, had needed to have laser-like accuracy and timing, but it hadn't been too much for him.

Kirito remained motionless in his final stance for several more moments. Feet evenly spaced, legs bent at the knees, his left leg forward, and both of his hands on his dagger, holding it in a position right by his chest. The pose made it look like he was some sort of bandit that was about to leap forward and plunge it into someone.

But that wasn't necessary anymore. Kirito knew that the fight was over simply by looking at the expression on his opponent's face. The skill gap between them was clear, and there was no reason to continue.

Without another word, Kirito put his dagger away and started walking over towards the still wide open boss room door.

The way he saw it, it was best to leave one player with functioning limbs in the area. If a random monster from the dungeon managed to wander their way over at some point, if everyone was unable to move, they'd literally all be killed by a single enemy because nobody could teleport without access to their menu or hotkeys. But with Diabel left in the area, he could serve as protection.

"W-what are you?" Diabel asked in astonishment in the stunned silence.

Over forty players had just witnessed their battle happen and none of them knew what to say now. They were all speechless.

Kirito didn't answer. Instead, he continued to walk towards the boss room.

He could have returned Diabel's words from earlier right back to him―and some part of him wanted to. Telling him that this was what Diabel's defeat looked like, and going on about how pathetic and weak they all turned out to be in a giant, villainous monologue from there.

But he decided not to. He figured that nothing really needed to be said.

There was a strange atmosphere in the room that he didn't want to break. Despite the fact that there were more than forty defeated players there on the ground, the room was silent.

Everyone had a defeated air about them and remained where they were, probably trying to anticipate―with a great amount of worry―just what Kirito was going to do to them next now that he had won.

They were watching his every move like a bunch of terrified sheep would with a wolf that had just wandered into the middle of their herd.

So Kirito decided to just give everyone a break and leave the area without another word. He had beaten them all and this was beyond any doubt.

Literally nobody would be able to make excuses about the outcome. Nobody would be able to say anything like: ' _well, actually, he only beat all of us because of reasons A, B and C'_ ―and imply that in other contexts they may have had a better chance.

No. He had fought them all at once and won. Kirito had defeated them all because he was just better. And they all knew it.

Kirito still had work to do anyway, so he decided to just get on with it.

He walked into the boss room.

Nobody stopped him.

Because nobody could.

* * *

Kirito slammed the doors shut with finality.

Then he walked over to the locking switch off to the side.

On his way over, he took a careful look around to make sure that there weren't any stray players that had wandered inside during the battle. After seeing none, he activated the switch.

The doors finally, after all of this time and effort, locked, and Kirito found himself alone.

He took a deep breath and sighed, before leaning against the wall.

He spent the next thirty seconds or so just staring at his hands. Part of him was still in disbelief at what they could do when he was in his current state of mind. The old version of him would have never in a million years been able to pull any of that off.

But he was different now. He could feel it.

Ordinarily, after a particularly heated battle in which he had needed to go all out and draw on that inner power of his, the feeling would fade away and leave him back in his normal state afterwards.

But it didn't happen this time. The change, whatever it was, seemed to stick around. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Kirito didn't know how to feel about that yet.

But a moment later, his concentration was broken.

"Why would you lock the door with yourself still inside?"

Kirito's eyebrow twitched at the familiar voice behind him.

He just couldn't catch a break.

* * *

**A Few Minutes Earlier**

"Listen up, you two," Diabel said. "Here's what we're going to do. One of us needs to go inside the boss room, and the other two need to ambush this guy."

"Why do we want someone inside?" Asuna asked.

"Because there is a good chance that we are going to fail to defeat this player. If that happens, we need someone inside to stop whatever he is trying to do."

"Okay well… Why don't we all just Hide inside the room then?"

Diabel's friend cut in next.

"My Hiding level isn't high enough to hold up in such a bright room even on my own. With the two of you added in, my camo won't work at all. I can only make use of it effectively out here where it's darker."

"That player did it with ease…" Asuna pointed out, referring to the orange player, and the many times she had witnessed him vanish without a trace.

"Because that guy is a fucking demon for all I care. His Hiding level has to be through the roof to pull something like that off. I don't have that capability yet."

"There's also the problem that he'll get suspicious if none of us show up again," Diabel explained. "He'll think we are up to something if we don't show up for the rest of the battle."

"Okay well, why don't we all sneak past him and finish off Illfang while he's distracted?" Asuna asked. "If all of us work together, sneak by this player, and try to finish Illfang off, we should be able to win, right?"

"Illfang has regenerated a bit since earlier," Diabel replied. "Take a look."

Even from where they were standing, they could still see Illfang in the distance. They could even make out his HP bar if they really focused. And while the boss himself was about a hundred meters away, they could still see that his HP was noticeably higher than it had been earlier.

"If the three of us went all out, it'd take us at least a minute or two," he continued. "Maybe if we got lucky we could pull it off in time, but this player would hear the battle. And even before that, he'd see us the instant my friend's camouflage deactivated on our way over. Long before we closed the distance."

The orange player was battling in clear sight of the boss door. He was outside the room itself, but he always made sure that he could see inside to make sure that nobody was trying anything funny by trying to sneak by him.

"He'd see the three of us, kick all our asses and throw us back outside. And then we would have no plan in place anymore. We'd lose the element of surprise and would not be able to regain it. We have to take advantage of the fact that this orange player does not know where we are right now, or what we are doing. We have to get the drop on him while we still have the opportunity. Because if we lose it, we will not get another."

"Okay, so one of us needs to stay inside the room. Makes sense," Asuna finally agreed.

But what she said next came as a surprise.

"I'm going to do that."

"You're volunteering?" Diabel asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Of course," she confirmed. "I want to see the look on his face when all his plans are ruined by yours truly." She was grinning in anticipation as she explained this.

"Hopefully, it won't come to that. With the two of us ambushing this player, there's a decent chance we'll take him down in one shot. You'll only meet him if everything goes wrong."

"Everything has already gone wrong," she replied. "This will too."

"I'm so grateful for your support," Diabel spoke sarcastically.

"S-sorry. But I have way more faith in this player's abilities than in yours," she explained sheepishly. "It wasn't an insult directed at you, but a compliment directed at him."

"I don't like that fact one bit. But I do understand where you're coming from. And it's why we have you as the backup plan."

Diabel's friend had been listening to the two in silence for the past several moments but finally decided to ask a question that had been weighing on his mind since Diabel had first started explaining this plan.

"I have a question."

"What?"

"Suppose everyone fails to beat this player and the worst-case scenario ends up happening. So this girl here ends up as the last one standing. That's what we're planning for here, right? How does this backup plan even help?"

"What do you mean?"

"If she's inside the room when this player closes the doors, Illfang won't regenerate. This is true. But it is very easy for this player to check whether his plan worked or not. After closing the doors, he can just re-open them again immediately to take a peek to see whether or not Illfang is at full health, right? The regeneration is instantaneous. So this player will definitely do this to check to see if it worked. He won't just… walk away after closing the doors. He'll want to be sure. And when he sees that Illfang has not regenerated he will know, with certainty, that someone is currently inside that room stopping it from happening, even if that player is completely invisible through the use of the Hiding skill. And he will go inside to drag whoever it is, out."

"If everyone else is limbless on the ground when that happens," he continued, "how are we going to buy the twenty or so minutes that we would all need to start recovering?"

He gestured at Asuna.

"She alone would have to buy all that time. How is she going to stop this player from dragging her out of the room for twenty full minutes, all on her own? I have no doubt that she's good, but just take a look at that for a moment."

He motioned toward the battle taking place between all the other players before them.

The moves that the orange player was pulling off were completely outrageous and out of control. He was destroying everyone with absolute ease.

He turned to look at Asuna and they made eye contact.

"Just like you said to Diabel earlier, I have way more faith in this player's abilities than in yours. Especially with that missing arm of yours."

There was a moment of silence. But after a few moments, Diabel grinned and made his reply.

"Those would all be very good points if it weren't for the one thing you're overlooking."

"What thing?"

"Earlier when I was fighting this guy―before the rest of this group of players arrived to help out―I noticed something very unusual about this player."

He cleared his throat and prepared to tell a story.

"Right after Asuna protected me from falling down the stairs―"

"I did not protect you!"

"―I sprinted back towards the doors to try and stop this player from closing them." Diabel continued, ignoring Asuna's angry and immediate rebuttal. "You see, at that time, there wasn't anyone else besides him in the room. So it was the closest he has been so far to succeeding. I had been the last player, and he had just thrown me outside. Meaning he was moments away from winning. If Asuna hadn't been there to save the day with her loving embrace, he would have won at that moment. Anyway―"

"Why are you telling this story in such an infuriating way? It isn't necessary!"

"―this player made his first attempt to close the boss doors right then. I just barely managed to stop him from succeeding."

"What's your point?" the cloaked player asked.

"Here's the thing. When he was closing those doors, he was trying to do so from the inside."

"Why is that important?"

"Well, that's just it. Isn't that weird?"

"Why would it be?"

"Why would he try to close the door with himself still inside the room? If he's in there, Illfang won't regenerate."

"So... what are you trying to say?"

"I'm saying that I have no idea what he's actually planning. It's definitely not as simple as just shutting the doors to get the boss to regenerate, though. There's more to it. I want Asuna inside that room not only to stop Illfang from regenerating when the doors close but mostly in order to find out what this player is actually trying to do. Something is off with what's going on here, and I don't know what it is yet."

"Well, he could just be trying to teleport. There's that locking switch, too, remember? He could be trying to lock everyone out of the room so that he can safely teleport after and get the boss to regenerate that way."

"Well… that blows a huge hole in my theory. I guess I was being too suspicious. So there actually is a reason why he might close the door from the inside, then?"

"...But at the same time, he wouldn't get confirmation. Doing things that way is definitely not the best way. Imagine if someone with a maxed out Hiding skill was still inside that room at the time, for example. Someone who is a complete master with that skill. If this orange player succeeded in throwing everyone else outside the room and locked the door from the inside, he would never be able to truly confirm that he was alone in the room. A Hiding master might still be inside and this player could never prove otherwise unless he had an equally powerful Searching skill. So when he teleports out, there would be a distinct possibility that Illfang wouldn't regenerate and this player would have no way of knowing because he'd be half a world away at spawn."

"The smarter way is to be outside the room when he closes the door," Diabel's friend continued. "That's the better way to do it and anyone would be able to figure that out. In that case, he could easily deduce whether or not someone else is inside the room by doing what I mentioned earlier―closing the doors and quickly reopening them to check Illfang's HP. If it hasn't recovered, someone's still in there and if they aren't visible, he will even know that they have a camouflage active."

"So, it's just like I was saying then! I was right all along! He's definitely doing something suspicious!"

"Or he's a moron and didn't think of it, but judging by how ridiculously skilled this player is, I wouldn't bet on that. You're probably right. He's up to something else. But I can't even imagine what that might be. Closing the doors from the inside doesn't seem to have any tangible benefit and comes with nothing but disadvantages. There's nothing to gain."

"...So we need someone in there to find out what's going on."

"Definitely. You've made me curious, Diabel. I really want to know what he's up to now."

"Are we all in agreement then?"

"Yeah."

"Sure," Asuna agreed as well.

"Great."

Diabel turned to Asuna and began explaining the rest of the plan to her.

"So my friend here will take you inside that room under his invisibility cloak and then come back here to get me. Then the two of us will do the ambush while you're inside. You'll have to hide somewhere near the door so that the monsters inside don't see you. If you go too far into the room, you'll draw their attention. So, either behind or on top of one of those pillars would work perfectly, because you also want to be out of sight from that player when he enters the room again. Otherwise, if he sees you, he won't close the doors."

"There's a locking switch on the wall next to the door," he continued. "When it's pressed, the doors can't be reopened until either all the players inside die, teleport out, or Illfang is defeated. There's a strong possibility that he'll press it, locking the two of you inside so take this just in case."

Diabel handed her a teleport crystal.

"Dude, if he has the Searching skill though, it won't matter," his friend pointed out. "He'll see her before he closes the door."

There was barely any cover at all inside that room. And the Searching skill would ruin everything.

"I know. If he does that, our whole plan is fucked."

There was a saving grace, though. Skilled players usually only selected one of those two skills in the early game―planning on picking up the other one only once the later floors had opened up and everyone had some additional skill slots to spare. So there was a pretty good chance that this player only had the one. And that was what Diabel was hoping for.

"Fuck. I hate having to rely on luck."

"So do I. But it's the best we've got."

"Sound good?"

"Yeah. Let's do it."

"At the very least, even if this guy does win, I can't imagine anything too serious happening as a consequence. So it probably won't be too bad."

"This guy's going through a lot of trouble to succeed though. There's no way it's all for nothing."

With that, the three players finally initiated their plan and Diabel's friend snuck Asuna into the room.

Diabel watched them go from his position on the stairs. Because of the fact that his friend had left―and therefore the camouflage that had been protecting him from being spotted by the orange player was now gone―Diabel had taken to lying down on top of the stairs with just his eyes peeking over the top step so that he could watch the battle as it continued to rage on whilst remaining reasonably concealed. The orange player was looking in the other direction anyway, so he was pretty sure that he would not be seen for the minute or two until his friend would return.

If it looked like the orange player was about to look his way, he'd just duck down.

* * *

There were two main approaches that Kirito had thought of, in getting what he wanted. Both of which had advantages and disadvantages to them.

His end goal was for Illfang to not only be at one-hundred percent HP but to also be the only remaining player inside the room and have the door locked so that nobody else could get in.

The first way to achieve that was the obvious way, and the way that looked to be the safest. This involved closing the doors just before entering the boss room and then quickly reopening them to see if Illfang's HP had changed or not. If it had regenerated, then that would mean that Kirito could be sure that there were no other players inside―not even hidden ones. And if it did not change, then that meant that there was someone in there.

At a surface level, this just looked like the best way to do things.

But Kirito was paranoid, and could not bring himself to do things like this because he required absolute, one-hundred percent confidence in his success, even if that came at a bit of a cost.

There was exactly one weak point inside this first plan that could cause him to lose everything if it was taken advantage of. It was incredibly unlikely that someone would be able to, but due to the fact that his whole future was depending on him succeeding in this task, he was not willing to take any risks.

This weakness could be seen by imagining what would happen if there were a small team of maxed out Hiding users, that all slipped inside the room while he had been fighting the players outside. Due to Kirito's lack of a Searching skill, this was a possibility. Or rather, Kirito could not prove that this hadn't happened.

But if this small team had slipped inside, and if they had somehow deduced that Kirito was trying to get Illfang to regenerate, they would know that the best approach to take was the obvious approach he had outlined earlier.

They would know that Kirito would likely close the doors from outside the room to get Illfang to regenerate, and quickly reopen them to confirm whether or not it had happened because this was the safest option to take.

But if one of these hidden players had anticipated all of this in advance, they could camp right next to the locking switch inside the room―completely invisible―and wait for the precise moment in which Kirito shut the doors of the room from the outside.

In that instant, they could lock it. And in that moment Kirito would end up as the guy locked outside the room, and then this team of players could finish off the boss.

That single weakness, even though it was unbelievably unlikely to be exploited, was enough for Kirito to abandon this approach.

He absolutely could not allow the boss doors to close unless he was inside the room at the time.

It was better to be locked inside the boss room with a small group of hidden players than to have been locked outside entirely.

But this also had a downside. Because he had not closed the door like this before walking inside the room, there had been no real way for him to confirm whether or not he was alone inside. So there had been a much higher chance of being crashed by another player.

It had been a tough decision to make. But Kirito had made it in the end, and it was why he had been trying to close the doors from the inside all along. It would allow the possibility of some players getting inside the room as well, but at the very least, there was no way he could become trapped outside.

He had hoped that nobody would actually try to sneak inside though, rendering all of his concerns pointless, but it looked like he was going to have to come up with a contingency plan now.

Because someone else was in the room with him.

Kirito turned around and faced the player behind him.

...Above him, actually.

At first, he had wondered just how a player had managed to escape his gaze when he had entered the room, but it was clear now. She had climbed up on top of the pillars and had actually laid down on top of them. Obscuring both his and Illfang's view of her.

The ingenuity of the idea frustrated the crap out of him. She had been in a blind spot and hadn't even needed to use the Hiding skill at all.

If Kirito had had the Searching skill, it never would have worked.

The girl was now victoriously smirking down at him.

"Do you have any idea…" Kirito began, "just how many times I'm going to throw you down those stairs outside for pulling this stunt?"

"Definitely more than one," he continued. "Why would you even do this? How, even? I would have noticed you walking passed me."

"You're never throwing me down those stairs ever again, mister!" she exclaimed. "Three times is way more than enough!"

"In fact," she continued, "after we make it to the second floor―and we will make it the second floor today, make no mistake―I'm never going to set foot on the first floor ever again, I suspect. You have single-handedly and forever tainted my view of it and I'm never coming back."

"Oh, you will, Stumpy," Kirito replied. "And when you do, I'm going to be there. And you will quickly find yourself in the embrace of the concrete steps outside when you do. It will happen again, I promise you."

Asuna's fists clenched.

"Why are you such an asshole?" she asked.

"Tell me, is it being an asshole to a cockroach when you swat it? Or do you kill it because it just keeps bugging you? People, in general, don't go around just looking for cockroaches to kill in their day-to-day life. They only do so when it gets in their face and starts being a nuisance. None of this would have happened if you had just walked away back then."

"I am not a cockroach!"

"You're pretty much a cockroach, actually. Every time I think you're gone, you just keep showing up again."

Asuna glared down at him for several moments.

"For your information, after you threw me down those stairs for the third time, I stumbled into Diabel. Turns out that he has a friend with the Hiding skill, just like you. Diabel called him over and came up with a plan. He sent his friend off with me, and we went invisible. We walked right by you as you were fighting those players outside and he helped me climb up a pillar."

"Is anyone else in here with you now?" Kirito asked.

He wouldn't actually believe her response, whatever it was, but if she admitted that there were, then things would at least be made a little easier.

"Unfortunately, no," she replied. "Everyone else is outside the room. It's just us, here."

"Diabel sent you on your own to face me?"

"Oh, I volunteered," she replied eagerly. "I wanted to see the look on your face when you realized that your plan wasn't going to work. Too bad I can't see it because of your stupid mask."

Kirito stared at her for a little bit.

Then he chuckled.

"For the love of God, stop laughing! I hate it when you do that! Nothing is funny for you in this situation!"

"I disagree. There's a lot of things that are funny here."

"Like what?!"

"Imagining you struggling up that pillar with only one arm for one. I can't quite figure out how you managed to do that―you don't have my AGI―but I'd bet it was hilarious. The other reason is because of the fact that you think you foiled my plan."

"I did foil your plan!"

"No, you didn't. I don't lose."

Asuna looked uneasy.

"W-what do you mean…?"

"Did you really think that I failed to take into account the possibility of someone sneaking in here behind me? Anyone could have thought of that. I was hoping nobody would be stupid enough to try it though because there's only one way I can think of in order to get you out of the room now because the door is locked."

"You aren't going to kill me."

"You don't think so?"

"I know so. You saved my life earlier. You wouldn't take it now."

Kirito ran up the side of the pillar and landed a few feet in front of her―precariously balanced on the concrete beam on top of the pillars.

"You're right. I'm not going to kill you."

Kirito pointed down to the ground below her.

"Jump down," he ordered.

"No," she refused.

Kirito blinked.

...Then he roundhouse kicked her off the ledge.

She yelped and landed like a bag of flour on the ground.

Kirito landed behind her.

"You just don't learn, do you?" he asked.

"Ow―! You jerk!"

Kirito pulled out a teleport crystal and tossed it at her.

She picked it up.

"What's this for?"

"Teleport out of the room."

The girl's eyes widened at the order.

"No!"

Kirito drew his sword.

"What are you going to do with that?" she asked. "You don't have anything to threaten me with. I know you aren't going to kill me."

Kirito walked right over top of her and impaled her through the stomach with his sword.

"Hrrk-!"

Kirito twisted the blade.

Asuna's eyes were wide in shock and terror and she frantically grabbed at it.

"Teleport," Kirito ordered.

Asuna's eyes narrowed.

"No!"

Kirito sighed.

"You just love to make things difficult, don't you?"

Kirito pulled the sword out and suddenly slashed off both of her legs before standing up.

Asuna blinked in disbelief at the sudden dismemberment. The sudden loss of a limb was jarring to experience in the virtual world. Partly because of the fact that there was so little pain involved, but also because of the fact that it took her brain a lot of time to adapt. She had still been struggling with the loss of her right arm―and that had happened several minutes ago now. But now she couldn't move at all. She could still think about moving, but nothing was responding because she hardly had any functioning limbs anymore.

Asuna's only remaining limb now was the arm that she was currently using to clutch the teleport crystal.

"Teleport," Kirito ordered once again.

"No!"

"You will instantly regenerate your limbs upon entering the safezone in the starting city," Kirito claimed.

However, he wasn't actually sure if this was true. He had never tested it out before. But it sounded reasonable enough to be true, and he didn't care whatsoever if it turned out to be a lie. If it worked in getting her out of the room, then it was worth it.

"But I'll leave you here alone to do whatever you were planning on doing!"

"So what? You have no idea what I'm planning. So why are you trying to stop me?"

"I know that it isn't good, whatever it is! So I'm going to stop you!"

"I'll give you a million cor if you teleport right now," Kirito claimed, pulling out the bag of cor that Diabel had refused only a few minutes prior.

"You think you can pay me off now?! How pathetic do you think I am?! That won't work either!"

"Fine."

Kirito turned and suddenly started walking towards the boss.

"W-what are you doing now?" Asuna asked, more than a little nervous.

"Getting the boss' attention," he admitted.

"Why?!" she shouted.

"Because you're being difficult."

In order to prevent Illfang from doing whatever he had been doing all along and hanging out against the far wall, Kirito had to reach a certain distance between them. He still had no idea why this was the case, but when someone was within the radius, Illfang began to act normally again. Otherwise, for some reason, he'd wander off to the far wall and just watch whatever was going on. So Kirito made sure to do this.

He advanced forwards, the boss walked backwards, and then Illfang's back hit the wall and could no longer retreat any further. This allowed Kirito to close the rest of the distance and forced Illfang to start thinking straight once again.

After getting close enough to the boss, Illfang finally started making his way over to the player in front of him.

Kirito, after getting the boss' attention, started kiting it over towards the girl.

Asuna, understandably, panicked. Because it was extremely obvious to her what was going to happen.

"Are you crazy?! Let me up! I can't move!"

"And whose fault is that?" Kirito asked as he steadily brought the boss over towards her. There were some minions that he also had to contend with, but they were easy enough to fend off.

"Yours!" she replied.

"No, it's yours," he 'corrected'. "Every single choice you've made today has been the wrong one. I'm almost impressed, actually, at how consistently in error your decisions are. You led yourself all the way here with them. If you want some advice, don't make the wrong choice again. And for you, that'll be easy. Whenever you are about to make your choice, just think to yourself, 'what would I normally choose to do in this situation'... then do the opposite. It's guaranteed to work every time."

Illfang lunged at him, but Kirito sidestepped it, causing Illfang to come to a sliding stop only a few dozen meters away from the girl. Kirito took advantage of that moment to distance himself from the boss.

After retreating out of range, Illfang suddenly realized that Asuna was now the closest target and started lumbering his way over to her.

"No! Wait! But… I'm going to die! You're going to kill me!"

"What are you talking about?" he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. "I'm trying to save you. I gave you a teleport crystal to escape your predicament. All you have to do is use it. I've provided every single tool that you need to save yourself. All you have to do is activate that item and say: 'teleport'. It could not be made any easier for you. I've done everything I can. But I can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. I can only spoon-feed you. You have to chew and swallow on your own."

"You won't kill me."

"I just told you. I'm not killing you. You're refusing to accept my aid."

"That's bullshit and you know it! You caused this situation so you can't be the saviour no matter how you look at it! My blood is going to be on your hands!"

"I don't see it that way."

"You won't let him kill me," she stated again with confidence.

"Are you willing to bet your life on that?"

Kirito could see the nervousness and worry in her eyes. He knew that she would fold. She'd have to be the dumbest person alive to let herself get killed like this.

"It's like I said. You led yourself here, so make your choice."

Kirito activated Hide and disappeared from her view.

Asuna stared in stunned disbelief at the spot where the player had just been a moment ago.

She looked up at Illfang, then towards the crystal in her one remaining hand.

Illfang raised his axe.

With no more time to think, Asuna made her choice.

...She threw the teleport crystal off to the side and closed her eyes.

She heard a thunderous impact less than a foot away from her head a second later and slowly opened her eyes.

The orange player had deflected the attack at the last moment, forcing it to land mere inches away.

The player launched Illfang back with a parry and turned to look down at her for several moments.

She got the impression that he was pissed.

* * *

Asuna and Kirito were sitting behind a pillar now, under the protection of his camouflage so that none of the other monsters in the room would make their way over. They had been sitting there for several minutes now without either of them saying a word.

The other player had paid no attention to her comfort whatsoever when he had bodily dragged her over to where they were now. After pulling her away from the monsters in the room, he had carelessly tossed her aside before setting up his camouflage ability so that it would conceal the both of them. But she didn't really pay any of this too much attention.

Because her life had flashed before her eyes. She had been an inch away from death, and so much had happened over the past few minutes.

She was still trying to process it all.

So she just sat there, with three missing limbs, without a word… right next to the orange player.

The tension in the air between them was unreal.

"How the hell are you even alive?" Kirito asked, breaking the intense silence.

"W-what?"

"With the sheer number of times in which you've carelessly thrown your life away in an instant, it's surprising to me that you've made it all the way to this moment. I'd have thought you'd have been killed as a child―leaping into the street to save the life of a squirrel and getting hit by a car or something dumb like that."

"You're screwed in the head," he concluded.

Asuna's face went red.

"I don't do this often!" she shouted. "I've just been having a rough month, okay!"

It had been a _really_ rough month on her. She had faced death more times than she could count, she had had many of her long-held views challenged, she had had her entire view of the world itself practically collapse, she had tried to kill herself, was convinced not to only at the last moment, was then betrayed by the person that did so not two days later, was constantly battling against absurd, fantasy creatures… it was just a constant, never-ending stream of ridiculously dramatic, life-changing events, one after the other.

But she had to just keep moving on. If she stopped for too long and started thinking about everything that had happened, she'd just crash and break down.

"Why would you do that?" the orange player asked her.

"D-do what?"

"Throw your life away on a gamble that I might save you."

"I knew you would."

"No, you didn't."

"I did."

"You literally gambled with your life, needlessly, on a decision made by a player that you don't even know. I can't wrap my mind around how anyone could do something like that."

"Impressed?"

Kirito shook his head in disbelief.

"The opposite. Why would I be impressed? It was the single dumbest thing I've ever seen."

"No, it wasn't. It wasn't dumb. It wasn't a gamble. I knew. And I know you well enough."

"No, you don't."

"Why did you save my life back then?" the girl asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"A few days ago, when we met for the first time, why did you stop me from continuing down the path I was on?"

"Why not? Because you were there."

"You didn't have to, but you did. It's the type of person you are."

"I owe you my life," she continued. "I should have died there, but you stopped it from happening. You're a hero. My hero."

Underneath his mask, Kirito cringed as if he had just eaten something foul.

"You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"You might be a humongous jerk, but deep down, you're a good person."

"No, I'm not. But okay, let's assume I agree with everything you just said for the sake of argument. If you owe me your life, why would you try to stop me from doing what I want?"

"I'm not trying to stop you. I'm trying to save you."

"You want to save… I… what?"

Kirito didn't know how to respond to that and fumbled over his words. He had not expected her to say anything even remotely similar to that and it threw him completely off his game.

"From what?" he asked, bewildered.

"Yourself!"

...

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"If you stop us from defeating Illfang, everyone will hate you and you will become a criminal forever! Stopping that from happening is repaying the debt to you that I owe! I have to stop you to save you!"

Kirito stared at her as if she were a filthy, disgusting animal.

"Is that really why you did all of this?" he asked, making no attempt to hide the hostility and distaste in his voice. "You're way too late for that. I'm already a criminal hated by everyone. Your stupid plan was never going to work."

"You're just being stubborn!"

Kirito whistled in amazement.

"I've never heard a more opportune moment to insert a 'pot meet kettle' reference."

"S-shut up."

"I'm being stubborn? I don't want to hear anything about that from someone like you."

"It's true! Nobody outside died! You went out of your way to ensure that you didn't kill anyone! And you're unreasonably strong! Nobody is going to hate you if you join forces with us! You'll practically be worshipped!"

"Just… stop all this," she almost whispered. "Let me help you."

"So you mean to tell me that after I dragged and threw you around, chucked you down those stairs―multiple times for that matter―promised to do so again in the future, beat the crap out of you, sliced your limbs off, and did a bunch of other things to you―"

"Grabbed the back of my head, pressed my face into the floor and treated me like a dog―"

"Which you totally deserved, by the way―"

"I did not! That was messed up!"

"But it's the only way to get someone like you to learn anything. Getting your butt kicked repeatedly during a fight apparently isn't enough to get you to back off. So, just like a dog, you have to be reminded, repeatedly, that continuing to attack me will leave you with nothing but a mouthful of staircase."

Kirito turned to face her and paid careful attention to her expression. It became clear very quickly that literally every single word out of his mouth was frustrating her even more.

"If you learn like a dog, I'll teach you like a dog," he continued. "And maybe after enough times, you'll finally correct your view that attacking me was ever a good idea."

The girl's face was bright red in both embarrassment and rage.

"You're insane."

"I'm not the one that has to be classically conditioned into being non-violent. That's all you. And you have no room to talk about other people's sanity. You're crazy and I'm not going to apologize for what I did."

He turned to face her.

"You still want to save me?" he asked in disgust.

"Yes," she replied without hesitation, and with full confidence.

"Even after being treated like a dog?"

"Es―"

Asuna cut herself off and sighed.

"I'm not actually all that angry about that."

"Seriously?"

"Don't get me wrong, I hate that you felt the need to do that, but I… sort of understand. I know what it's like to be really angry at someone. In hindsight, I really should have known what would have happened when I tried attacking you from behind like that."

"So in other words, the conditioning worked?"

Asuna blinked.

"What? No! But… I―"

Asuna stared at him for several moments in shocked disbelief. She wracked her brain for a good response but couldn't come up with one. What the orange player had just suggested to her definitely wasn't what happened. But it sort of looked like it was. That there was at least some truth to it.

She didn't like that one bit.

"S-shut up. That's not what happened. And I really don't like the fact that that's what it looks like."

"But, yes, in other words," she continued. "Even after all of that I still want to save you. But I would really appreciate it if you didn't do something like that to me ever again."

Kirito just stared at her for a while after that.

…

"Are you real?" Kirito he eventually asked after several moments of prolonged silence, sounding as if he were doubting the very nature of reality.

"W-what?"

"Nobody in real life acts like you do. You're either lying, or you are the biggest goody-two-shoes that ever lived. I mean… holy cow. You're like a saint. When you aren't angry, anyways. You definitely didn't deserve being trapped in this game."

It was the weirdest thing. Stuff that this girl realistically should get really angry about, she let slide. And stuff that she really shouldn't get angry about, she became furious over. But underneath it all was one of the most benevolent souls that he had ever seen.

' _I mean, who the hell goes out of their way to try to save someone that repeatedly humiliates them in public like that? An enemy at that?'_

It almost hurt his eyes to look at her when she pulled out that bright, angelic aura of hers. She was way too pure-hearted. Unrealistically so.

"Do you know what else I didn't deserve?" she challenged. "Getting thrown down those stairs. Or any of that other stuff you did to me, for that matter."

Kirito chuckled.

"Oh, no, you definitely deserved all of that. Make no mistake, I'd do it all again in a heartbeat, even knowing what I do now."

"You―!"

"You tried to ruin my plans, Stumpy. And you're trying to do it again now. You deserved everything that you got. I was simply telling you how you didn't deserve to be here in the game in general."

"Stop calling me that! It's humiliating!"

"That's precisely why I'm calling you that."

"And it's why I want you to stop!"

"Then what would you like me to call you then if not Stumpy? You've got no limbs."

"I have one left!" she hollered back, gesturing with her one remaining arm. "And the rest are growing back! Just give it some more time!"

"Fine, whatever. You don't like Stumpy? Let's get rid of Stumpy."

"Good. I appreciate it. Thank you for respecting my wishes."

"I mean, Roach works just as well."

"That's even worse! I'm not a cockroach, you ass!"

"...Or maybe something staircase-related? I know just how much you love those things."

Asuna clenched her fist.

Kirito started brainstorming.

"Stairs… Steps… Steppy… maybe something like Steppy McGee? Eh. It's kinda dumb but…"

"I have a name already! Use it!"

"...Though I have just now realized that you may not even know it," she continued. "My name is Asuna. Please refer to me as such from now on. Not Roach, not Stumpy, not Steppy McGee, A-su-na."

"Fine, whatever."

"Thank you."

…

The next twenty seconds or so passed by in dead silence. All throughout this time―ever since they had sat down, actually―Kirito had been seriously considering whether or not he should just kill this girl and be done with her. She was the last thing standing in his way now. Once he got rid of her, he would win. And that was all that mattered.

But there was a big difference between killing someone by accident―as he had with that crasher―and killing someone on purpose. And despite the massive shift in his worldview that had taken place only a few minutes ago now that had caused him to focus on winning at everything above all else, he knew that he wouldn't be able to actually go through with it.

No matter how annoying this girl was, he couldn't just kill her.

...But he couldn't lose, either. So he needed to find another way.

He kept thinking.

"So…" the girl spoke up. "I couldn't help but notice the fact that you did not return the favour."

"What are you talking about now?" Kirito asked.

"Isn't it rude to not give your own name when someone else takes the time to introduce themselves to you?"

"Probably," he replied, before going right back to his thoughts and ignoring her.

The silence returned.

…

"I guess I walked right into that one, didn't I?" she asked. "Why did I expect anything more out of you?"

"A good question. That's the real lesson here. You need to stop doing that."

"Maybe you should stop being a jerk so I won't have to!"

"And miss out on these self-righteous lectures? How could I?"

"Your sarcasm isn't appreciated."

"Believe me, there is nothing sarcastic about calling you self-righteous."

The girl grumbled a bit at that, but elected not to reply. Instead, she changed the subject.

"If you don't want to give me your name then I'll make something up, just like you did for me."

"Oooh~. This'll be good," he replied, with very fake enthusiasm. "Go ahead."

"How about… Chuckles?"

Kirito chuckled.

"See? It's perfect for you."

"It is actually pretty good."

"No, it's not!" she exclaimed, outraged. "That's not the reaction you're supposed to be having to it! It's supposed to be humiliating!"

"Not everyone hates dumb nicknames as much as you seem to. I don't care what you call me."

"Your real name would be nice."

"I'm sure it would."

"I would like it very much if you told it to me."

"That's cool."

"That was a hint by the way."

"Was it? I couldn't tell."

...

"Please tell me what your name is," she eventually pleaded.

"No."

"Why?"

"I have no reason to."

"Being polite isn't good enough for you?"

"Why would I be polite to an enemy?"

"We're not enemies anymore! And if you stop being an ass we might even become friends later!"

"If I tell you my name will you teleport out of the room?"

"I…"

She suddenly fell silent.

"Not enemies, huh? You see? We have opposing goals. That makes us enemies. We can't both get what we want."

"Maybe we can."

"We definitely can't."

"Why don't you tell me what you're trying to do then? We can talk about it. If you do, I just might forgive you for everything."

"I don't give a crap about your forgiveness."

"W-what?"

"Why do you think I'm going to apologize to you and ask for it? If anything, I'm going to give you another one-way trip down the stairs outside."

"Why is it that you insist on acting like such a jerk all the time?! You know, I hope you realize the fact that you're in the exact same position that I was in, just a few days ago. I was just as insistent that I was right back then until you showed me otherwise! I'm just trying to do the same thing for you!"

"The difference is that you were actually being an idiot back then. I, on the other hand, actually have something that I need to do. A goal. Something worthwhile that is much more productive than getting my brains blown out of my skull by the NerveGear for no reason."

"What do you need to do? Maybe I can help?"

"Look, you―"

Suddenly, Kirito stopped speaking entirely.

Two thoughts had occurred to him in that moment.

...So he got real quiet and just stared at the girl while he went over the possibilities.

There was good news and bad news.

Well―potentially bad news. But as he thought about it a bit more, he realized that even in the worst-case scenario, his real-life identity was still safe.

He had never posted any connection between his in-game username and his real-life identity on the internet. So, even if someone successfully tied his current, hooded appearance to the well-known player Kirito, all of their work would still be ahead of them. They could not make the further step in connecting Kirito with Kazuto.

Even if everyone knew that Kirito had been the one to battle all these players and stop the raid―even if it was discovered that he was a PKer―the consequences of that would only last until the game was over as long as he never showed anyone what his real face looked like.

But that was what this bad news was. If his hunch was right, there was a distinct possibility that Argo had just figured out who he was.

This was a bit of a strange realization to have considering the fact that Argo wasn't even in the room at the time and didn't seem to be anywhere close to the situation. But all of the pieces were there for her to make this discovery, and Kirito only just picked up on this now.

She probably hadn't figured it out yet, now that he thought about it, but it was possible for her to do so, now.

All that remained was to confirm.

But there was good news, too. And that had to do with the seemingly unrelated fact that he had likely just figured out a way to get this thorn in his side to leave the room voluntarily.

It was going to be tricky―and he was going to have to manipulate the shit out of this upcoming conversation―but he could see a reasonable way out now.

He was just going to have to play things perfectly.

He was going to have to win this battle with his words instead of his swords, and he had never done anything like that before.

But, to his surprise, he was ready for it.

He still wasn't nervous. Or worried. Not even with the specter of Argo breathing down his neck. He hadn't felt any strong emotions really, ever since he had drawn that line between those two-floor tiles and had declared that he'd never lose at anything ever again.

Even his anger at this rapier user was mostly superficial.

He was mostly just irritated at the unrealistic number of obstacles that kept on trying to get in his way.

It was starting to get absurd.

It was like the universe wasn't even trying to come up with believable excuses to stop him from achieving his goals anymore. It was just trying to screw him over by any means necessary.

First there were those two players, then Agil, then the rest of the raid group, and now this girl...

Time and time again, he kept running into a stupid number of random encounters.

 _That_ was what this whole situation had devolved into.

He had had a plan in place but his RNG had been so bad that his simple idea to lock the boss door had turned into a grandmaster-level quest. And right when he thought that he was finished with it, the final boss arrived. But annoyingly, he couldn't just fight this boss, either. Because it was actually a puzzle quest―not a combat one―and it was chock-full of annoying, scripted, randomization that was different for everyone so he couldn't just go on the internet and look up a solution guide to it.

The worst sort of quest.

He was having to constantly make up for all of this bad luck with an overabundance of skill―and he would freely admit that it was starting to frustrate him a little bit.

But he would make up for it in the end. He would win. If for no other reason then to spite whatever god of misfortune that was trying to stop him in the first place.

Even if it wasn't an actual, physical fight―a domain in which he excelled―he wasn't going to lose. If he needed to lie and manipulate, then he would lie and manipulate.

Kirito continued to stare intensely at the girl in front of him for several more moments.

She blushed and turned away.

"W-what?" she asked shyly.

"I'll offer you a trade."

"What trade?"

"I'll tell you why I stopped the raid from succeeding today if, in exchange, you answer a few questions of mine."

"You will?!" she asked, perking up and sounding excited.

"Yes."

"Then I accept! Ask away!"

…

"You don't even want to know what questions I'm going to ask?"

"It doesn't matter. If you'll tell me why you did all of this I'll answer anything."

Rather than get into a pointless argument about how there were, in fact, plenty of questions that he was sure that she would not answer―and that she would be quite angry about if they were asked―Kirito decided to just stick to his original plan and continue from there.

"You said something earlier that I couldn't help but notice. Have you ever met someone by the name of Argo?"

Her whole countenance changed at the mention of that name. Kirito thought that she looked like a child that had just realized that Santa Claus wasn't actually real after all and that it had been her parents giving her presents the whole time.

Her expression just dropped.

"Ugh. The Rat? Why do you want to know about her? She's crazy."

Kirito blinked.

"And you're not?" he couldn't help but ask. The way he saw it, this girl was in no position to say that about someone else.

"Shut up. Name one thing that I did today that was crazy or unbelievable."

"Today?" he asked in disbelief. "We don't have to leave the last twenty minutes."

"Remember that time when―way, way back," Kirito continued, "when you picked up that minion and started swinging it around?"

That was like twenty minutes ago, tops. Probably less.

"Okay, to be fair, you really pissed me off," she replied.

Kirito shared his opinion about that remark without delay.

"When you ask a crazy axe murderer why they did what they did and killed a bunch of people, the excuse: 'I was really mad at them at the time' doesn't tend to hold up very well in court. They're still crazy, and so are you. Are you trying to tell me you've calmed down since then? What changed between then and now?"

"Look, I looked up to you, okay?" she replied, exasperated. "Back when we met, you saved my life. I literally see you as my hero. And now, to see you as my enemy… it hurts. It felt like you stabbed me in the back. And I wanted retribution. But now, I really just want to know why."

She sighed.

"I wasn't crazy, just… really really angry. At you in particular. But I'm mostly just tired now. It's been made clear to me, repeatedly, that no matter what I do I'll never be able to actually defeat you. So trying to force any answers out of you with violence just isn't going to work. I guess you can only be thrown down a staircase so many times by someone before you finally just give up on trying to defeat them."

...

"You need to pick better people to look up to," Kirito said after a few moments. "If literally anyone else had been walking through there that day, they would have done the same thing I did."

"I don't believe that."

"Why not? I would have figured that you of all people would have had more faith in humanity than that."

"Plenty of people walked right past me without a word. You were the first one who stopped to see if I was okay. You were the one who stopped back then. Not anyone else. And now we're here."

"If I had known that saving you would have caused me so much trouble, I wouldn't have done it," he grumbled to himself. "It's proven itself to be a bad investment so far."

"But, whatever," he continued. "Fine. I'm willing to tell you what you want to know. But first, I want to know if you've met Argo."

"I have."

"Recently?"

"Earlier today, actually. I've known her for quite some time."

"Are you friends?"

"I don't know if 'friends' is the right word… she bothers me. A lot. She loves to tease me about strange things."

"She treats all her friends like that."

"Really?"

"She singles you out from crowds, right? If you're in a big group of players, she heads straight for you?"

Asuna blinked. A truer statement had not been said that day. That girl practically had an 'Asuna-detector' hardwired into her skull and she always made a beeline straight for her whenever she was within range.

"Oh, yeah," she confirmed. "That's definitely true. She definitely picks on me much more than she does any of the players outside. Probably anyone else in the whole world."

"That was exactly what I wanted to know. That you are the closest player to her out of everyone in the raid group outside. All forty-whatever players."

This meant that Argo probably trusted her the most.

...His hunch was looking more and more likely to be correct, then.

"Yeah. That's definitely true."

"Did she give you anything before the raid?" Kirito asked.

"Did she… Actually, yeah, now that you mention it. I completely forgot about it. She actually gave me this necklace. She told me to keep it on."

Kirito's eyebrow twitched. Sometimes, it sucked being exactly right about something.

"Why?" he asked.

"She never told me."

"But you did it anyway?"

"She has a way of getting what she wants."

"She blackmailed you, didn't she?"

A sizeable blush appeared across Asuna's face, clearly indicating that Kirito had hit the nail right on the head and that the whole incident had probably been hilarious, and/or embarrassing.

"Yes," she admitted with a grimace.

"What did she say?"

"I-I'd rather not share. It was inappropriate, to say the least."

"Inappropriate in a threatening way?"

"I-in a lewd way. Threatening also, though."

"Oh. Yeah, you've definitely met Argo, then."

That brought back a ton of memories from the past. That was just how Argo operated. She just loved teasing and making people feel uncomfortable, and loved when she got a reaction out of them. Kirito could easily imagine just how frequent a target Asuna would be to that girl since she was so easily wound up about the simplest things.

But Argo was also clever. As a practical spymaster, she had all sorts of schemes cooked up in order to learn new information about all manner of different things.

One of her methods in particular that Kirito had seen her use before involved the concealment of recording crystals.

There was a wide array of items that allowed a player to record sights and sounds in the game. From crystals that picked up audio signals only, to ones that recorded video as well, and as an information specialist, this was one of Argo's go-to methods for gathering intel.

It was obvious to him now, in hindsight, that a boss raid was the perfect opportunity to record such information and if Kirito's hunch was correct, then that necklace that Asuna was wearing had just such a device hidden inside it.

"Can I see it?" he asked.

He didn't really know what he expected to see, as a recording crystal―when it was concealed―could look like any number of different items, but he figured that he may still recognize something familiar in the way that it was designed.

This was definitely possible so early on in the game. In order to modify the shape of a recording crystal in this way, you needed to have a really high-level Crafter involved in the process. And since there were no such Crafters in the game yet―in all likelihood―the work was probably shoddy at best.

And this was the primary reason why he wasn't very nervous at the moment.

There were pros and cons to all the various types of recording crystals out there, and they could really all be summed up in terms of data capacity. A crystal can only store so much data, and on the first floor, the options were very limited in that respect. Better ones were only obtained on higher floors.

This meant that Argo would have had to make do with a pretty bad crystal with a low amount of data capacity to get the information that she wanted, and would have had to cut a lot of corners.

And due to the fact that she had clearly not told Asuna about why she wanted her to wear this necklace in the first place or what it's purpose was, the situation was clear. The crystal had been recording the whole time. Ever since Argo had given it to her. Argo was trying to record information throughout the entire duration of the raid.

And this was actually good news.

Because it meant that the device would have had to have been recording ever since the very beginning when all the players had set out to the labyrinth, several hours ago. But due to the data limit on these devices, in order to record for that long, a big sacrifice in quality was required.

So every corner that could have been cut in that respect had to have been.

There would certainly be no audio, for example, as video was way more important and there probably wouldn't be enough room for it.

It wouldn't be a 3d video either. A 2d projection would have been needed. It probably wouldn't even be in colour. It would be grainy, and there were all sorts of other techniques out there by which a player could sacrifice video quality in exchange for video length, and many such sacrifices would have been needed to record for so long.

And as these quality losses stacked up more and more, the harder it would be for Argo to figure out who he was and what had happened.

Kirito hadn't really explored this domain all that much, but with his Photography skill, he was probably going to need to in the future. He only had a surface level understanding of the topic. So there was probably a huge amount of recording crystal support tied up in that skill that he just didn't know about yet.

"What?" Asuna asked.

"The necklace. Can I see it?"

"Oh, sure."

Asuna reached up with her only remaining arm and took the necklace off her neck and handed it over to him.

Kirito examined the item.

All of a sudden, in his menu, a plethora of new information was provided to him.

His Photography skill had kicked in. Apparently, with it, he now had the ability to analyze recording devices and see what they were capable of in the same way that a weapon's specialist could see the stats on a weapon.

'Appraising' was the term that was often used. And now, he could do it with items like the one in his hand now.

This was a lucky break. The first one that he had had in a while.

For all of the bad RNG that had happened that day, this was the first instance in which luck had played in his favour.

Because he had not planned for that to happen. He hadn't even imagined that his Photography skill could be used like that. He had literally just lucked his way into acquiring a significant countermeasure against Argo. It had happened by chance. But with it, he could thwart a lot of her schemes now.

It was just more evidence to the fact that Photography―the skill he had completely written off as useless at first glance―could very well become one of his most prized assets.

He opened up his menu and navigated to his Photography page and started reading up on the new information there. Due to the fact that this new ability had manifested spontaneously because the right circumstances had been in place, just like always, this meant that his guide had updated with new information.

"What are you doing?" the girl asked.

"What does it look like?" he replied.

"It looks like you're going through your menu."

"There you go."

He continued navigating through the pages and left it at that.

…

"B-but…"

Kirito's eyebrow twitched.

"What?" he asked, slightly irritated at the girl for interrupting his reading.

"I can't see it," she said.

"You can't see what?"

"Your menu."

"What's your point?"

"When I open up my menu," she explained, "anyone can see it. Why can't I see yours?"

"Because I turned the visibility off."

"Y-you can do that?"

"I can."

"How do I do that?"

"You can't."

"Why not?"

"What skills do you have?"

"You need a skill to hide your menu?"

"Yeah."

"Shouldn't everyone be able to do that? That sounds like it should be a feature that's default for everyone. I don't like other people being able to see what I'm doing on my menu."

Kirito sighed before doing a quick cost-benefit analysis in his head.

If he quickly explained the concept, it'd probably take less time overall than having her constantly interrupting him with nosy questions. So he decided to just do it. There didn't seem to be an obvious downside and it'd only take a minute or so.

"One of the design philosophies behind the creation of this game is that teamwork is meant to be encouraged as much as possible," he began. "As a result, the developers did two things. They made skill slots extremely limited and valuable, and they put many convenient features behind skill-walls."

"So you don't have a lot of skill slots," Kirito continued, "but the game tries to force you to use as many of them as possible so that you run out of them fast. A lot of 'unlocks' are just things that should have been there for everyone at the start, and just make your life less of a hassle rather than giving you something new and useful. I guess the main idea behind it is to force all the players to work together and prevent solo players from being able to do too much on their own."

"If you want to get something done," he said, "say, building this necklace, for example, you need, like, ten different skills."

Kirito tried to tally a few of them off on his fingers, but quickly gave up.

"A Crafter, a Blacksmith… and a bunch of other intermediate skills that I can't name off the top of my head because I'm not familiar with this process in particular. The point is, no one player can do all of that because skill slots are so hard to come by, so you need a team of a bunch of different people and you all need to organize and agree with each other and plan out your skill slots together so that you can get things like this done."

"It's meant to incentivize teamwork, and penalize solo players," he summarized.

"On the other hand, though," Kirito pointed out, "it's just like you said. Because it penalizes solo players, no one player can really do very much on their own. As it turns out, there are a ton of convenient features that should really belong to everyone but that don't, not just the one you brought up. Capturing and recording game footage is another example. So is access to calculators and spreadsheet software, or hiding your menu, or hell, even in-game access to the fan-made sword art online wiki so that players can reference all of that accumulated information freely, whenever they want."

"But for better or worse, that's not how it works," he said.

"And for what it's worth, I agree with you. I think it's kind of dumb," he concluded.

Now, with her curiosity sated, maybe she'd leave him alone.

...

"What skill do you need for it? Hiding?"

' _Fuck.'_

Apparently, it would not be so easy to get her to shut up.

"Yes. You need Hiding."

"So if I pick it up right now I can get it?"

"You have an empty skill slot?"

"I do."

"Well, you can pick it up if you want, but you won't be able to hide your menu for a while."

"Why?"

"Because you need a pretty high level in the skill to get it."

"What level?"

"A pretty high level."

The girl narrowed her eyes at the evasive answer.

"When do you unlock it?" she asked again.

"After getting your level pretty high."

"What specific level do you unlock it at?" she pressed.

"Somewhere between level 1, and level 1000."

"That covers the whole range! Just answer the question!"

"No."

"Why?!"

"Why do you think? Because if I do, you'll be able to reverse engineer what my level is. You'll think, 'if you need level x in order to hide your menu, and this guy can hide his menu, then he must be at least level x.'"

She gaped at him.

"You are insufferably suspicious of my intentions! I just want to hide my menu!"

"Then pick up the skill and find out on your own. Or better yet, ask your good pal Argo. She'll know."

"But she'll make me pay for it!"

"So what? She charges, like, 500 cor. That's ten or twenty boars."

"No, no, you don't understand," Asuna said, righteous indignation colouring her tone. "She lets everyone else pay her money to buy information from her, but she makes a special exception for me!"

"She gives it to you for free?" he asked.

That didn't seem like a good business model.

"No!" she shouted. "The opposite! She tries to blackmail me into embarrassing myself for her entertainment instead! I would love to pay money like everyone else does but she will 'suddenly and inexplicably' spike all her prices the instant I enter the room!"

It was clear that she wanted to get this off her chest, so Kirito let her continue her rant unabated. He looked back at his menu and continued reading, listening with only half of his attention.

He didn't care about this girl or her problems.

"It's completely unfair!" she continued. "She claims that the economy is just wildly out of control and that there's nothing that can be done and then―get this―she tells me not to worry and that we can make 'alternative arrangements for payment'. Those are her exact words! And let me tell you, it is just as shady as it sounds!"

Kirito grinned under his mask. Argo knew exactly what she was doing. Asuna had no idea whatsoever, but she was the literal, perfect target for her. Argo must have been thrilled to meet someone like Asuna. Getting wound up like this did her no favours whatsoever.

Kirito finished reading his skill guide a few moments later and abruptly stood up.

"I'll be right back," he said, before turning and walking away.

"W-where are you going?" Asuna asked, worried.

"Don't worry about it."

"You know… If you leave me here alone the monsters in this room will see me. Your invisibility cloak is the only thing that's preventing that."

"You overestimate the visual range on these things. You could walk out from behind this pillar right into the open and those things over there wouldn't be able to tell. Well, I mean―you could if you weren't a cripple―"

"Rude!"

"―And besides I'll be back in like ten seconds. Not even."

"O-okay, well, please hurry up then."

Kirito, still invisible, climbed up the pillar and went over to grab his camera. It had been recording the whole time and he took this opportunity to finally pick it up.

Then he climbed back down and sat down next to the girl again.

He tapped on his camera and started going through the settings.

"What is that?"

"What is what?"

"That thing in your hands?"

"A rock."

"That is clearly not a rock! How dumb do you think I am?!"

"It's not about being dumb, it's that I don't care whether or not you know that I'm lying to you. You're an enemy. Why would I tell you anything?"

"For now."

"What?"

"I'm your enemy for now. Once you tell me why you stopped the raid, you'll probably become my friend."

"It's unrealistic how forgiving you are. Extremely suspicious."

"No, it's not! It's true!"

"Whatever."

"What, you don't believe me? You saved my life! That supersedes all that other stuff you did to me!"

Rather than try and convince her, or get into some sort of rational discussion, Kirito decided to be petty and childish because it was easier.

"It 'supersedes'?" Kirito asked, mocking her word choice. "Nerd."

He knew that it was hypocritical of him to call her this, but the intent was not to be truthful but to piss the girl off.

It worked.

"S-shut up!" she shouted.

"―But it's true," she continued after a moment to collect her thoughts, not allowing herself to be derailed by his taunt. "You'll become my friend after this, just you wait."

"No, I won't."

"You will."

"Friendship is a two-way street," Kirito felt the need to point out. "While you may have warped the facts in your mind enough to convince yourself that befriending me is a good idea for you, I haven't. You have done nothing but attempt to impede my progress at every turn. Why would I become your friend?"

"Because I'm the only one that knows the truth."

"What truth?"

"That you're not actually a bad guy. Just a jerk."

Kirito cringed. He really didn't like how this girl kept trying to paint him in a positive light. It made him think about what he had done. How he had actually murdered someone in cold blood.

One thing was certain. He was definitely not a 'good guy'. And the implication otherwise was making his resentment for this girl flare up a little bit.

He grit his teeth but didn't say anything else. Instead, he just focused on his next plan.

It turned out that his camera was a hell of a lot more than just a camera. It had recently unlocked some incredible capabilities. Due to the fact that he had been recording this entire raid and all of the following battles, and because the vast majority of that stuff had been deemed 'extremely interesting' by the system, the skill had levelled up a ton and he had unlocked some new stuff.

He had a bunch of backed-up level-up notifications that he only just now skimmed through.

The first thing he noticed was the fact that his storage had increased a bit. Just like any recording crystal, his camera had a data cap on it as well. However, his was set high enough that he would not need to worry about hitting that limit any time soon. He'd be able to use the camera constantly for several more months before hitting that cap, if his math was right, and even when he did, there were ways that he could create more storage.

Just like in the real world there was a way to offload the footage onto what were, essentially, external drives. Kirito didn't know how to build them yet, but the possibility of creating them in-game was stated almost directly in the skill guide on his menu, so he would probably be able to figure it out later―long before the storage issue became relevant.

But the second capability he had unlocked was what really interested him. He could, essentially, break into other recording devices and see how they worked.

...Sort of. As with most of his abilities that sounded amazing at first glance, there were asterisks everywhere. But the ability was still really good.

Take Argo's necklace for instance―Kirito could see roughly how it had been set up and could view the footage that had been captured by it with his camera. He could even copy it all over. It took some time to do the transfer, and he needed to have the device he was breaking into right in his hands at the time, but it could be done.

As it turned out, there was this whole field of game mechanics relating to in-game data encryption that he had just stumbled into by accident with his Photography skill. You could modify recording crystals so that they were harder to break into, and you could program recording devices so that they could do different things like record after a time delay, or under certain other conditions.

It was basically this game's equivalent of hardware-designing. There was a skill in this game that he now had the option to pick up, called Crystal Design, with which he could literally make crystals from the ground up in the same way that a player could make potions.

It was a hidden skill that only unlocked after two prerequisites were achieved. You needed a maxed out Mixing skill in order to create the advanced potions needed for the creation of the crystal bases, but the other prerequisite was less well-defined.

The Photography skill was only one way with which to fulfill it. Basically, what needed to happen was your character needed to 'discover' though some method, that there was more to crystals than simply being magic stones. He had 'discovered' this by figuring out that it was possible to transfer footage between recording devices. This was enough to fulfill the second prerequisite of the skill and had caused it to show up as an option in his menu. He didn't actually have the skill active right now, but he could pick it up in the future if he wanted to, whenever he had an open skill slot.

However, there were other ways through which that discovery could have been made―and by which that second prerequisite could have been fulfilled. The Photography skill itself wasn't strictly required for it. It was just one path, and so this new skill was not technically a unique one. It was just hidden. It was probably true that he was the first player to stumble upon it, but it was definitely possible for other players to pick the skill up later if they found a way to fulfill that other prerequisite in another way.

So as it was, modifying recording crystals and doing all kinds of other fancy crystal modifications fell outside the scope of his Photography skill on its own. That was all encapsulated in the Crystal Design skill. All that he could do with his Photography skill was see how other recording devices worked, and it supported transferring footage between them.

However, this data transfer was actually not technically part of the Photography skill itself, but rather, a capability of his specific camera. He needed his camera to do this and could not do it on his own.

And this had allowed him to deduce two things. Firstly, it was possible to have the Photography skill without access to his specific camera, meaning, that this skill too was probably not unique as he had at first thought. And secondly, it was the capabilities of his camera that had fulfilled that second Crystal Design prerequisite, not the Photography skill itself.

If he had stumbled upon the Photography skill through a different means―possibly by finding a weaker, less-capable camera, one that was not capable of hacking into other devices and transferring footage―he very well might not have stumbled upon this new skill.

But as far as he could tell, this Crystal Design skill was right up his alley. It was the sort of skill that he would have picked up as a hobby if this weren't a death game.

But upon rationally considering it, given his current situation, he wondered about whether it was a good idea to pick it up in the future.

He couldn't think of a real application for it. Any crystal that he needed he could just buy. And he didn't think that he'd really need to be able to modify recording crystals.

It would also involve an absolutely massive time and financial investment. He'd literally have to set up a lab. He'd also have to hire a bunch of Crafters and Blacksmiths to create all of his equipment.

To be fair, he was probably going to have to do this anyway when he started experimenting with his Mixing skill in any real sense―as a lot of the really good potions involved much more than simply mixing ingredients together―but he would need to do so to a far greater extent if he started trying to make crystals. Some pretty high-tech equipment was involved and needed to be custom-made.

And to top it all off, he couldn't actually buy a plot of land to set everything up under the protection of a safe zone. This meant that the designs for all of his equipment would have to be extensively modified to make them modular, portable, and easy to tear down.

This was possible, in principle, to do, but designing equipment on your own took a long time.

Every production-based skill like this, whether that was Crafting, or Blacksmithing...or Crystal Design for that matter, had a built-in feature that allowed you to create designs for equipment that you needed.

A Blacksmith, for example, could sit down, open up the design interface, and make a design for a really cool forge, or something. They could make it as elaborate as they wanted to and with any capabilities allowed by the physics engine of the game. And when they were done, the finished design would be right there, sitting in their menu.

But at that moment, that's all it would be. Just a finalized design. To actually build the thing, you needed to have all the right skills.

Someone with the Woodworking skill would be needed to make any part that was made out of wood. A Blacksmith would be needed for anything made of metal. And for composite components, players with different skills would all have to come together at the same location to create the part together, at the same time. And depending on how intricate the parts were, a level prerequisite for each skill necessary in the process would be calculated by the system. So if you didn't have all those skills levelled up to that level, you couldn't make that part of the design.

There was this whole design sharing feature built into the game to deal with this―that Kirito had almost no real experience with―that allowed players to collaborate in this way. One player didn't have to do everything by themselves. You could create a design necessary for your production skill, break the design down into component parts, and trade these designs to other players with the necessary expertise that you lack, to get those parts built.

And then contracts were involved to make sure that each player actually honoured their end of the agreement and didn't just steal the designs and run with them, and that you actually ended up with the part that you needed at the end―and all of this, Kirito would need to learn how to do.

And being orange cranked the difficulty of the task way up.

The question would then naturally arise as to whether it was worth it. All throughout this time in which he was learning how to use this system and was designing his lab, he could have been grinding or picking up new skills and levelling up.

And what if he set up his lab somewhere only for it to get attacked by someone? He wouldn't have a safe zone to protect him. And simply putting the pieces inside a safe zone wasn't enough―anyone could just grab a piece of equipment and drag it out of the safe zone if they wanted to.

There was a reason why Blacksmiths and Crafters actually bought plots of land. When you were in a chunk of land that you had actually bought and paid for, you had a lot of extra permissions at your disposal. You could bolt equipment down to the ground to prevent it from being stolen, for one. And that alone was enough to make it worthwhile.

But Kirito did not know if it was possible for an orange player to buy land like this. So he'd be on his own.

And for what? The possibility that Crystal Design might actually allow for the creation of custom crystals not allowed by the base game that were phenomenally powerful? Maybe that was possible. And if it was, then yeah, it'd probably be worth it in the end, but Kirito didn't know for sure.

All in all, it was a skill that he was really interested in pursuing as a hobby but that he couldn't really justify with a cost-benefit analysis because of all the unknowns and the time investment. It would lock him down for long periods of time just figuring out what he needed to do.

Making a simple potion lab was one thing, as all the equipment needed for one had been iterated on and optimized by the playerbase during the beta. The best designs had all been on the wiki that he had regularly visited back then and he'd be able to remake any of them from memory with almost no real effort on his part.

But nobody had found the Crystal Design skill back then. So any new required equipment he would have to design himself. He would be the guy footing the bill for all the mistakes that would be made in the attempts to find the most efficient designs. Both the opportunity cost and the financial cost.

And all because crystals _might_ be worth making.

Might.

...If he was lucky.

In the end, he had no choice but to decide to just keep the idea in the back of his mind and continue with his current plans. No matter what he chose, he still had to solo Illfang first. He needed the extra skill slots that he would get from doing that.

He had to finish winning. If he couldn't do that and gain that huge xp drop, then there was definitely no way to justify just halting all grinding for months as he jumped headfirst down this Crystal Design rabbit-hole.

Not that that was relevant or anything. Because he definitely would win and there was no doubt about it in his mind.

When the data transfer from the necklace was completed, Kirito opened up the file and started scrolling through the footage to see if there was anything incriminating on it.

As he had expected, he had to scroll almost seventy-five percent of the way through the video to even make it to the beginning of the raid.

Argo had not told Asuna about the implanted camera. If she had, and if she had instructed Asuna to only start recording upon reaching the room, all of that wasted data spent on recording grainy footage of the players just travelling to the boss room could have been cut out. All of that freed up data could have then been used to improve the quality of the rest of the video and, in particular, could have added audio to it.

That had really been the only thing that Kirito had been worried about. Argo would have been able to recognize his voice during the few times he had spoken.

But she couldn't, now. So his hunch had actually been wrong. Even with this full video at her disposal, it would not be possible to identify him as the orange player.

His identity still seemed to be safe.

Now, if it were up to Kirito, he would have done one of two things in that moment.

If he could have, he would have erased the footage collected anyways, just to be safe.

...But he could not do this as modifying a recording crystal with that sort of finesse like that required the Crystal Design skill.

It was possible to just destroy the item though, in theory.

...But only if it belonged to him. Items belonging to other players were indestructible when they were in the hands of someone else.

As an example, Kirito could not steal someone's sword and start grinding it against the wall to wreck its durability. This would do no damage to it. The sword had to be in use by its owner to degrade.

Incidentally, this meant that it was possible for all players to use weapons that never degraded if everyone just agreed to use weapons that did not belong to themselves, and if everyone handed them over to each other and didn't re-summon them back. However, this was impractical as there was no way you'd get everyone to agree to that, and because nobody would have access to sword skills even if they did.

But in any case, these same concepts applied to this necklace. Right now, it belonged to Asuna. So Kirito couldn't destroy it. And if he made an attempt to hide it or otherwise keep it away from her, at any time, she could just open up her menu and summon it back to her hands.

There were only three ways to prevent this footage from making it back to Argo's hands. Convince Asuna not to give it back to her, get her to voluntarily destroy the item, or Kirito would have to kill her. That would make him the new owner of the item, and grant him the ability to do whatever he wanted with it.

But he did not see the need to do any of these things, especially when he continued to fast forward only to find perfect footage of Asuna falling down the stairs.

It had all been recorded. And not just the first fall, either. All three times she had tumbled down that staircase had been perfectly captured.

A copy of this footage was also now on his camera.

The footage was black and white, and a bit grainy, and there was no sound, but Kirito knew exactly what would happen when it got into Argo's hands.

When Argo had dirt like this on someone, she had a ton of leverage over them. Kirito had experienced this first hand back in the beta. The ultimate revenge that Kirito could unleash now, on Asuna, after all of these new revelations, involved ensuring that this footage was seen by The Rat.

The teasing that would follow would be a sight to behold. And Kirito could finally rest easy with the knowledge that Asuna was suffering through that somewhere in the world even if he wasn't there to see it for himself.

Because of the fact that his menu was hidden, Asuna had not been able to see what he had been watching. So she still didn't know what this necklace actually was. And by simply not telling her that this was actually a recording device, she would, undoubtedly, give it back to Argo when this was all over, as she had been blackmailed into doing, sealing her fate.

Kirito briefly considered the consequences of doing this. Because the crystal was still, at that moment, continuing to record. So the fact that the necklace was currently in his hands at that moment would be picked up by Argo. It was being recorded. And so was the strange brick-shaped camera in his hands.

' _But what would she be able to do with that information?'_ he asked himself.

Kirito wracked his brain for a few moments and tried to put himself in Argo's shoes. He imagined her, having no knowledge of anything that had transpired, sitting in a room and watching this entire video.

Kirito's face was blacked out on it, so The Rat wouldn't even be able to read his lips―a skill she was quite talented at. So she would have no knowledge about what had been talked about all throughout the battle. Furthermore, because of the fact that the necklace had been around Asunas's neck, Asuna's lips as well, were almost never seen either. So the vast majority of everything that had been discussed had not been recorded.

Kirito imagined that Argo would be extremely frustrated with the lack of information that she had received and would be kicking herself for not getting any audio. If she had anticipated the possibility of a single player intervening and stopping the raid like this, she would have definitely made other arrangements. But as she had only been planning on filming the battle with Illfang, she had probably thought it to be good enough as is.

As for Kirito's display of combat abilities, that was no secret anymore anyways. Everyone currently outside the boss room had already seen them. So even though a big chunk of his feats was missing in the video due to the fact that the camera was in a state of falling down a staircase with such unprecedented frequency, the secret about what he could do was already out.

But letting this video get back to Argo definitely would have some consequences, he was sure.

There were an uncomfortable number of hints about who he was, out there, and Argo would be able to use them in order to rapidly narrow down the pool of potential players that his hooded persona actually was.

The first of which was the fact that the 'Hooded Demon'―the moniker that had been given to the player that had saved that group of players from an exploding fruit that one time near Horunka Village―would almost certainly be linked to the player that had stopped the boss raid from succeeding.

All that would need to happen to make this connection is if any of those players he had saved back then saw this video for themselves. They would immediately recognize the fighting style in what they were watching and would be able to tell with a pretty high level of confidence that they were the same guy.

To be fair, though, this would probably take some time to happen. Argo would have to first think of the idea of showing this video to those players first. Or she would have to publicly release the video to everyone so that they would. But this wasn't a common strategy of hers. She tended to prefer keeping all of her evidence as secret as possible from everyone except for her inner circle.

So there actually was a slim chance that the Hooded Demon would not be linked to the player that had stopped the raid after all, but it was unlikely. It really all depended on what Argo decided to do with her recording.

It was probably best, in his opinion, to proceed as if she would make this connection, though. At least at some point.

So those two players would be linked. It would be determined that the Hooded Demon was the orange player that stopped the raid. If that was deduced, where could Argo go from there?

Well, Kirito had heard the rumours circulating around about his merchant persona―the one that he donned whenever he was dealing with Agil and Timely, and back when he had been running his 'shop'.

It was assumed by a large percentage of the playerbase that those two players were linked as well. That there was some sort of connection between the Hooded Demon, and that mysterious merchant. Some had made the additional leap that they may actually be the same person, but most accepted the fact that they were not, and were just part of the same guild or were perhaps just friends or business partners.

It was rare to find a player that was both a really well-known merchant, as well as a really good combatant. Everyone tended to be too specialized to be really good in multiple different areas like that. So it was seen as much more likely that these two personas of his were different people.

There was a lot of speculation around that topic since Kirito had made such a big impact on the economy of the game. But he had been careful to not give away any details about who he was, and with a lack of information like this, there were only rumours. The public was completely in the dark about the nature of that connection, but it was still widely accepted that there was a connection of some sort there. And so Kirito's merchant persona would inevitably be connected to all of this as well.

So there would be a web of connections constructed between those three players. The merchant, the Hooded Demon, and the guy that stopped the raid. Argo―and really anyone that put in a similar amount of investigative work―would be able to reason themselves up to that point without much trouble.

But as far as he could tell, there wasn't a way to confirm, with certainty, that all three of these players were actually the same. There would be some suspicions, but nothing concrete.

But there was one consequence of all of this that Kirito really didn't like having to face but that he realized was probably necessary.

Because of the fact that his merchant persona was going to be implicated in all of this once Agil and Timely learned about all of these developments, Kirito probably would not be able to continue working with them.

They would be uncomfortable, to say the least, about aiding a criminal that had made themselves the enemy of all the rest of the players.

So Kirito was probably going to have to give all of that up.

This was… annoying, as it would force him to have to re-do all of his work in setting up another contact to trade with, but he was prepared to make that sacrifice. If it meant that he could solo Illfang, it was worth the price.

The xp drop was just too huge to ignore.

But this wasn't the only consequence that would happen. There were more.

Argo would be able to whittle down the possible choices of who the player that stopped the raid might be.

It would be known that he was male. Most players were, but it would be confirmed by Diabel and Asuna, both of whom had heard his voice directly.

It would also be known that he was almost certainly a beta tester. Nobody else would have the skills necessary to battle the entire raid party on their own.

And this is where the high casualty rate of the beta testers would come back to bite him. The majority of that group of players were now dead―having fallen into various beta-targeting traps that had been set up deliberately to punish their prior knowledge. The differences between the different versions of the game had killed a ton of people. Way more than a lot of people realized.

Argo herself had been a beta tester, so she knew a lot of them―both living and dead. She would know which names on the monument of life were beta testers and by crossing all the dead ones off her list of 'possible identities for the orange player' the list would be dropped to only a few hundred names.

Something like half of those remaining ones would be able to be immediately crossed out, though, due to the fact that the skillset of the remaining beta testers was so heavily skewed.

The vast majority of the beta testers that had been killed already had been players who were essentially trying to speedrun the start of the game. They had run off on their own on the first day with a plan in their mind to use their prior knowledge to get good gear. However, only the combat-oriented players had done this, so only those sorts of players had been wiped out. And this left the Crafters, the Blacksmiths, and all the other non-combat beta testers alive, and they now made up the vast majority of the survivors.

There just weren't very many combat-oriented beta testers around anymore.

Yet, one of them had to be the orange player that stopped the raid. Argo would be able to cross out all other players from her list of possibilities.

Essentially, the only viable possibilities were the former elite players. The best of the best. And there were only about twenty players in that group―these being the ones that were really well known as being exceptional combatants.

Kirito was among them.

And if she were to combine all the evidence that she had collected so far, including the fact that Kirito had vanished off her radar, muted her, and essentially vanished from her sight, pieces would start clicking if they hadn't already.

She wouldn't have confirmation, but after seeing this video of hers, and hearing about the story of the orange player that had stopped the raid, she would probably at least suspect the possibility that Kirito was that orange player.

That idea would run through her head at least once, at some point. Whether she took it seriously or not was another matter.

It made too much sense. They had been pretty close, after all. Argo had to know that something extreme must have happened to make him go no-contact with her. And the fact that he had become orange would just make too much sense for her to not at least consider the idea.

She wouldn't be able to deduce why he was orange, though. Just that he was. And only during the time that this video was being recorded. Just like Diabel had mentioned earlier, she probably wouldn't know that he had been orange before the raid. She'd probably just assume, just like the blue-haired player had, that he had become orange only when he had first attacked Diabel and would revert back afterwards.

Unless...

If it turned out that his old suspicion, the theory that his name might already be on the monument of life―labelled as the killer of that Crasher―and that Argo had already gone through that whole list, then she might already know.

After considering all of this, Kirito really didn't like how easy it was to make all of these connections. He had been so careful but it hadn't mattered. All of these tiny little details just added up neatly to form a frighteningly accurate picture.

The list of items he had bought off of Timely was yet another example of this. If Timely ever told Argo about them―if he gave her that list―then this would create even more evidence of the connection between his merchant persona and the orange player that stopped the raid because a player as shrewd as Argo would be able to scrutinize this footage and identify those same items being used by him, in it. And that strongly implied that the merchant had supplied the weapons and equipment used for the operation.

Once the players all started collaborating and sharing information and theories about who the orange player was, it was almost certainly the case that the name Kirito would be directly implicated.

He had been wrong before. Now that he had put some more thought into it, he realized that his identity wasn't so safe after all.

There was so much evidence out there now that Argo might not even be the first player to put all the pieces together. There were many players out there who had publicly wondered about just where Kirito was. He had been pretty well-known by a lot of people.

Kirito is the orange player.

Someone would almost certainly come to that conclusion. And they wouldn't even need Argo's video to do it either. Just the stories from the players outside mixed with the widespread collaboration and sharing of information from everyone else would be enough to do it.

It would make no difference destroying this footage, even if he could, he realized.

The name Kirito would almost certainly go down in infamy with or without it.

But… there was still that final wall that there was no way to climb over yet. There was absolutely no way to make the jump from Kirito to Kazuto Kirigaya. He hadn't even told Argo his real name before. So it would not be able to be traced back to him by another player.

The best someone could do is get a recording of his voice. But lots of people sound the same, and nobody would have the idea to run around after the SAO incident was over to collect voice samples from all of the survivors to try and piece together who the orange player might have been.

That would be ridiculous and unethical.

But… now that he thought about it, he began to wonder about what would happen if someone actually did do that.

AI systems could do crazy things with voice and facial recognition, after all.

As these doubts started to creep back into his mind, he forcefully halted himself.

...Because that was the old Kirito that worried and planned around what would happen if he lost.

But there was no 'if' anymore.

' _I don't lose.'_

All of these details that added up to form a picture of who the orange player is were a result of things not going according to his plans. He had set goals for himself back then―various ways to hide his identity―and had failed to achieve them. He had lost. Plenty of times, too. The past version of Kirito lost a lot of times without ever realizing. And now Argo would be able to reason her way all the way up to his username.

But he was still in the game. As long as his real-life identity was not known by anyone, then nothing else mattered.

And it wasn't known. It couldn't be.

So he could still win.

He would.

And when he thought about it that way, everything suddenly made sense.

In order to win, it had to be impossible to lose. And that made the solution to the problem obvious. So in order to prevent his identity from being traced back to him, he had to become someone else.

' _This is the final conversation I will have in this game using the voice of Kazuto Kirigaya.'_

He wasn't a voice actor, but he'd learn. He'd completely change the way his natural voice sounded and become a new person.

He'd throw out his identity and make a new one.

He'd dye his hair, change his hairstyle, and put on a real mask―not his Hiding ability, but a real, physical mask to prevent anyone from seeing his face if his Mask ability ever deactivated. With how close he had come to that already happening just a few minutes ago when all of those Searching players had teamed up on him, this was a cause for concern, now. Especially because of the fact that he already had the Hiding skill maxed out.

He could not make it any more powerful than it already was. But the other players could definitely still improve their Searching abilities. And this meant that in the long run, it would be harder and harder for him to continue Hiding from large groups of people. There would come a day in which he would not be able to Hide anything except for maybe one or two things about himself. He could probably keep his name hidden forever―by putting all of his Global Hide Rate into it and keeping all of his other abilities permanently disabled―but then he would not be able to rely on that skill to hide the rest of his appearance in those brief instants of time when dozens of players all activated Search on him, together.

So he needed to look into other methods for protecting himself.

He'd even look into ways of changing the structure of his face. He didn't know if there actually were any ways to do that inside the game, but he'd look into it. And if he could, he certainly would.

Then whenever he got around to waking up in the real world once the game was clear, he'd keep the ruse going. He'd keep his new voice in anticipation of being secretly recorded.

His sister would probably be confused for a while, but he'd probably be able to play it off as his voice having changed due to not having used it for so long due to being in a coma, and because of puberty kicking in, or something.

Then maybe, after months back home, he'd finally be safe to be himself again.

As it was, only Asuna and Diabel had heard his real voice. But Kirito could get around this now. If he deliberately let slip the idea that he could freely change his appearance and voice to throw off the people hunting him down, then he would be able to play his real, natural voice and appearance off as if they were actually the fake ones.

Even if his real voice had somehow been recorded through some means, he could just make it look like it was actually fake by adopting a different voice by the time he next spoke to another player and if he pretended as if that fake voice was actually real.

He could invalidate any incriminating evidence against him by doing this.

He needed to learn how to completely change his voice at will. And because of the fact that doing this was the only way to win, he knew that he would succeed in the end. It was inevitable.

It'd actually be relatively easy.

With his camera, he could record his own voice and play it back to himself while he was practicing to see how he sounded until he perfected his new identity. And when he was done creating one, he'd make another. And another.

And he'd keep making more until he had absolute control over his own voice to make it utterly impossible for anyone to identify him through that means. And he would do the same thing for his appearance.

If Argo was looking for Kirito then he'd make damn sure that there was no Kirito for her to find. Kirito would just be an identity that he adopted on occasion. Since Kirito's face had not been revealed to anyone yet, he could retroactively change it.

'Kirito' could actually be a blonde-haired, blue-eyed fourteen-year-old with Kazuto Kirigaya's natural voice and nobody would notice the problem. Nobody knew yet that Kirito actually had black hair so he could pretend otherwise and nobody would be able to call him out on it.

All videos of Kirito in action from the beta used his old avatar from before the switch. And that didn't necessarily correlate to his real appearance.

So in order to protect his identity, he had to throw it away. Argo was simply too smart for Kirito to be able to safely assume that she wouldn't eventually track him down. The past version of Kirito had given away too many clues for her to pick up on.

Drastic measures like this needed to be taken.

Kirito concluded with the thought that there was no significant risk to him by allowing the footage on this necklace to be distributed however Argo saw fit.

If Argo figured everything out, then he'd just redouble his efforts into never seeing her again. He didn't care all that much if the name Kirito went down in infamy. The only thing that mattered was if someone managed to tie that name to Kazuto Kirigaya. That was where any real-life consequences could show themselves.

But he had been incredibly diligent about separating his online and private lives. So he was still safe.

But allowing this necklace to land back in Argo's hands would definitely frustrate the hell out of Asuna when it came to light that that's what had happened, and that was a win in his book.

So he would allow it.

"Alright, that's all I wanted to know," Kirito said after he was done with it. "You can have this back now."

"W-what did you do with it?"

"I was just admiring the craftsmanship."

"Why can't you just be truthful for a change?"

"Because there's a quota on it. I can either tell you the truth about this, or I can tell you the truth about why I stopped the raid. I can't do both. It's just too exhausting. No one can be expected to do something arduous like that."

"Telling the truth about two things is arduous for you?! Lying is harder! How is it that you can so consistently manage to piss me off with only a handful of words?!"

"Because you make it too easy."

Asuna sighed.

"Argo tells me the same thing all the time. I hope you two never meet."

' _So do I.'_

"Anyway, do you want to hear the story or not?" Kirito asked.

"Of course I do!"

"Okay then. Pay attention, because I'm only going to tell you this once."

* * *

The story that Kirito intended to tell her was going to have a ton of manipulated facts in it. And a ton of lies. He had a specific objective that he was trying to achieve by telling it and being honest was not required in order to win.

So the whole story was going to be based around one true thing that had happened, and almost everything else would be a lie. But the girl wouldn't be able to prove that this was the case, so if everything went well, all the lies he was about to tell her would go unnoticed until long after he had successfully carried out his plan.

"This isn't the first time I've been in this room," Kirito began. "I've actually been here a few times over the past few days."

"That day we first met, I was actually heading here to do some recon," he explained.

"What for?" Asuna asked.

"I work as a scout for a pretty secretive party of players. The details behind them aren't really important, but basically, it was my job to come here into this room to see if there was anything off about the boss."

"I don't know if you know about this or not," he continued, "but there have been a lot of differences found between this version of the game and the beta test. So I came here that day we met to see if there was anything of the sort in this room. I was supposed to come inside this room, wake Illfang, and sort of... probe him. See if any of his attack cycles were different or anything like that. It wasn't really a battle, just a test."

"Why didn't I hear about this?" Asuna asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Back at the boss meeting," she explained, "nobody mentioned anything about scoping out the boss beforehand. In fact, I don't think anybody there even did that. We just went off the information given to us from the beta testers."

"None of us were at the meeting," Kirito answered.

"Why not? If we had had you in this battle, Illfang would have been defeated with ease. With you, me, Diabel, and everyone else… it would have been so easy."

"We weren't there because, to my surprise, I actually did find something off about Illfang," Kirito explained.

"What was it?"

"That's the thing. I don't know. During my test battle with him that day he did something that should have been impossible. For just a moment, I turned away from him. I was being attacked from behind by a couple of the minions and didn't see any danger in doing so as Illfang was on the complete opposite side of the room at the time."

"There was no way Illfang could have taken advantage of it since I only turned away for a second," he recounted. "Yet, in that single instant, somehow, he did something. I don't know what, or how, but he hit me from the opposite side of the room. The impact of this ranged attack, or whatever the hell it was, was so incredible, that he nearly one-shot me with it."

"Are you serious?" she asked, astonished.

"Yeah. If I had delayed pulling out my teleport crystal for even a tenth of a second longer than I had, I'd be dead right now. As it was, I barely escaped. And the fact that I did was entirely due to luck. When I appeared in the Town Of Beginnings, I had 3 HP left. True story."

Kirito figured that adding as much truth to the series of lies as possible would give it more credibility.

"You came that close to dying? But Illfang didn't do anything like that against us!"

"You're right, he didn't. And that's why I stopped the raid."

"You mean that you…"

"Back when this happened, that party of players and I began an investigation, and over the next day or so, we came back to this room time and time again trying to recreate whatever the boss had done at that moment."

"But no matter what we tried… nothing. It was as if it had never happened at all."

"Why didn't you warn anyone about this at the boss meeting?"

"Because nobody would have believed me."

"What do you mean?"

"It makes sense, doesn't it? I'm some mysterious hooded player that refuses to tell anyone so much as his name. If I told everyone that the seemingly super easy to defeat first floor boss about this ultimate, secret, mysterious attack, they'd just laugh it off. I don't even know, exactly, what happened myself. Was it even an attack? Was it some sort of glitch? I don't understand any of the details, so I have no credibility."

"Well, you've certainly got credibility now!" Asuna shouted.

Kirito blinked.

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing says 'heed my warning' quite like defeating the entire raid group of players you're trying to convince, single-handedly! People are definitely going to listen to whatever you have to say now!"

"Yeah, well, nobody knew anything about me back then, so nobody had any reason to believe me. I wasn't going to waste my time trying to convince people when I had no evidence and when there were much better things to do at the time. People have to see these sorts of things for themselves in order to believe them, so that was the decision I made."

"I let the raid happen," Kirito said, "fully convinced that Illfang would do whatever he did back then, once more. But I was not so irresponsible as to do so without taking any precautions. I actually entered this room about an hour before you guys did. I was lying in wait the whole time in order to prepare to intervene whenever it looked like Illfang was going to do whatever he did again. I watched the whole battle, ready to jump in if things went south on you."

"But then… Illfang never did it," he explained. "You guys got him all the way down to about one percent of his HP and not once did he even try."

"So I made the decision. One I still stand by. I will not let Illfang die until I figure out what happened."

"B-but why? If he has this secret, dangerous attack, why wouldn't you want him to die as quickly as possible?"

"Because then nobody would ever know about it. If Illfang can have a secret attack like this, then so can the floor bosses on the higher floors. The players need to know that the floor bosses are significantly harder than what they look like. That they are different from the beta. But they can't just be told about it. They have to be shown. The bosses can hide things deliberately, just like people can, and are far more intelligent than they act. It's better to learn that here on the first floor with such an easy to defeat floor boss than to be blindsided by it later."

"So you mean to tell me that once you figure this all out, you'll let us kill the boss?"

"Of course."

"Thank God."

Asuna smiled and let out a massive sigh of relief.

Kirito raised an eyebrow.

"What's up with you?"

"I thought that you were trying to prevent us from completing the game. Having someone like you as an enemy long-term would have set us so far back… you don't even know. You're terrifying to fight against do you know that? But you've actually been on our side this whole time, haven't you? You never betrayed me at all."

"So… wait. You believe me?"

"Of course!"

"Why?"

Kirito had had a whole slew of false explanations and excuses ready to go to convince her that he was telling the truth when she inevitably started poking holes in his story. But none of them, apparently, were necessary.

"Because you wouldn't lie to me."

"I lie to you all the time. You've even pointed it out a few times when it happened."

"Not about important things like this you don't."

"So you just… believe all of that just because I said so?"

"Yes."

"One day, your complete willingness to trust total strangers implicitly is going to get you killed. You must have scared the hell out of your parents when you were younger when you―undoubtedly―blindly followed every last stranger in the street that said he had candy in his van that he wanted to share with you."

"Hey! I'm trying to be nice! Do you want me to believe you or not?!"

"I don't care if you believe me or not. It doesn't matter. I understand why people don't. I need corroborating evidence to back up my story."

"Well, that's just perfect then. I'll do that for you."

"No, my recording crystal will do that for me. I didn't have one on me back then, which was a dumb mistake in hindsight. But I do now. I'll get a video of Illfang doing his attack this time and release it to everyone. You need to teleport out of the room now."

"Why?"

"Because the best way to get Illfang to do his attack is to recreate the situation exactly as it happened. I was alone at the time, so I need to be alone again."

This was his plan A in getting her to leave. Give her a reasonable explanation about why it's a good idea for her to leave the room of her own volition.

None of what he had revealed mattered whether or not it got out. If the story spread, the worst thing that would happen is that the rest of the players would be more careful when fighting future bosses. And there was nothing bad about that.

"That's why you wanted everyone out of the room and locked yourself inside?"

"Yes."

"So you want me to leave then?"

"Yeah."

...

"Well...sorry, I'm still not going to do that. I want to see the attack too."

' _You might just be the most frustrating person that I've ever had to deal with,'_ Kirito thought to himself.

"He won't do it until you leave, though," Kirito explained, trying to salvage the situation.

"Are you totally sure about that?" the girl asked.

"Pretty sure."

"But not one-hundred percent, totally sure?"

After hearing the stubbornness lacing the tone of her voice as the girl asked him that question, Kirito knew that he was going to have to resort to plan B. His easy method to convince her to leave the room of her own choice had failed, but he still had several backups. Some of which were going to be tricky to pull off and would depend on whether or not he was able to get Illfang to perform the swat again.

And he'd have to let her stick around for a bit as well.

"Fine then. If you want to stick around then don't get in the way."

"What are you talking about?" Asuna asked. "Once I get my limbs back I'm going to help you."

"I'm not going to let you kill the boss."

"I know. And I promise not to. Once we get Illfang to do his thing, we'll both teleport out. Then we'll reschedule the raid and have you lead it."

She made this suggestion as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"I'm not leading shit."

"I'd rather follow you than Diabel."

"You really don't like that guy, huh?"

"He's just… annoying, sometimes. He gets―"

"Yeah, yeah, you've explained it all already. He gets in the way all the time, and is as slippery― and as blue―as Dish Soap. Who could forget?"

"You were listening? That makes me happy."

"You were shouting pretty loudly at the time. Everyone could hear."

"O-oh."

Asuna blushed in embarrassment.

"He's bubbly too," she added, after a moment of thought.

"I don't know what that means."

"He acts super nice to everyone all the time."

"So you hate how friendly he is?"

"No, I love friendly people. I hate the fact that he tries so hard to look like a hero. It's like he tries to be famous and is overly dramatic but it doesn't feel genuine. Just… be normal. Real heroes don't have to try to act like heroes. Everyone just knows that they are."

"He rallies the troops though. If that's what the other players like to see in a leader then it's fine by me."

"Yeah, yeah, it's fine, and I'm probably being nitpicky because I'm still holding a bit of a grudge against him but it doesn't matter. You're way better."

"I'm not a leader."

"You should be."

"I just kicked the collective asses of the entire raid group. Nobody would follow me."

"Everybody would follow you for exactly that reason! You would run the tightest ship ever and nobody would dare to challenge your authority! You crushed Diabel and all the players he led by yourself! There are going to be a lot of doubts in the future about whether or not Diabel should remain in charge of everything when there is so obviously a better option to choose!"

"I'm still not going to do it."

"Would you think about it if I asked nicely?"

"That would have the opposite effect actually."

"So… you'd be more likely to refuse my request because it's me that's asking? And because I'm being polite about it?"

"Yeah."

"Haven't we passed this already?" she asked in frustration. "We aren't enemies anymore! You don't have to be such a jerk to me now! I'm on your side!"

"That remains to be seen."

"Fine! I'll show you with my actions instead! At the very least, will you promise to take part in the next raid after we finish up here and reschedule it, even if you don't lead it?"

"Fine, whatever."

This technically was the truth, actually. Only, contrary to her expectations, the next raid would be him soloing the boss. Not all the other players ganging up on it like she was imagining. So he technically would be taking part in the next raid after it was rescheduled.

"Good! I'll hold you to it."

"Fine. Do whatever you want, then."

Their conversation died down again after that for some time. In order for Kirito's plan to work, Asuna needed to be on her feet, so he had no choice but to wait for her to recover before he could begin trying to figure out what Illfang had done back then.

The Swat. It was about time for him to finally figure out what that was, and how it worked. He'd have an unfortunate tagalong during that time, but he'd ditch her by the end. His first backup plan in getting rid of her was already in motion and was going perfectly so far.

…

"So, uh, how long does it take to regrow a limb?" Asuna suddenly broke the silence with a question.

"It'd be instantaneous if you teleported right now."

He figured it was worth a shot.

"I'm sure it would. But I'm not going to do that, so…"

"It's complicated," Kirito explained. "It depends on your HP, and on whether you move around a lot. If you sit perfectly still and get your HP back up to max, it takes something like thirty minutes."

"That's a really long time."

"It is. There is a reason why forearm guards and shin guards exist. Speaking of which, I imagine that they are going to spike in price pretty soon. So if you want to make a lot of money, you could teleport and start buying them up now before the rest of the players do and before the price spikes due to the increased demand."

She couldn't help but laugh.

"You think the price will spike because of what you did?"

"I guarantee it. People are dumb like that."

"This game is crazy. You just mangled forty players and left them in a pile outside, and the only long-term consequence that is going to happen is that there is going to be a measurable increase in the price and demand of forearm and shin guards. Have I got that right?"

"Yeah. In fact, many of those players outside are probably more concerned about losing out on this opportunity to make money than on not having any limbs. Since they can't move, you should go now before the opportunity passes you by."

"How do you expect me to do that? I can't move, either."

"Teleport to the Town of Beginnings. It'll instantly regenerate your limbs."

"And why aren't the players outside doing that?"

"Because unlike them, I left you with an arm. If you don't have limbs, you can't access your menu or teleport. Teleport crystals are also still extremely rare. Almost nobody has them yet."

"This sounds like a long-winded excuse to try and shoe-horn me out of the room. Why can't you just be more direct about it?"

"Get the hell out of this room right now, bitch, or I'll fucking snap your neck. How's that?"

Anonymity was a hell of a thing. There was no way he'd ever be able to say something like that to someone's face in real life. Even saying it behind his identity protections would have ordinarily been impossible. But after all that had happened so far, and after the change he had undergone, he found that it was remarkably easy to just say whatever he wanted to now.

"...I have suddenly come to realize that I prefer the other way a little more," Asuna claimed, remarkably composed even though she was terrified at the sudden, drastic change in the tone of his voice. "Forget what I said, please."

It seemed that she had forgotten the fact that he was still extremely hostile towards her.

"I figured you might," Kirito continued nonchalantly. "So what do you think? There's an opportunity to make a lot of money here if you go now."

"I turned down a million cor from you, earlier, remember? Paying me off isn't going to work. But there is one thing I've been meaning to ask, how were you able to do all of that? Is it really that easy to remove a limb from a player?"

"Not really. I happen to be a bit of a special case. My level is much higher than everyone else's and that difference is magnified at early levels."

"What do you mean?"

Kirito turned and looked at her, wondering, for a few moments, whether or not it was worth the effort to explain the concept to her. Eventually, he decided to do it because there wasn't really a reason not to. Giving her some information might even boost her survivability which could, in turn, boost his own in the long run. The more skilled players there were, the better his odds of getting out of the game.

Well, he knew that he was getting out alive eventually, even if he was the last player left at the end. But he'd get out quicker if there were a lot of skilled players out there who were all working together and helping him.

"Okay, here's my go-to example when explaining this, the number 3 is 1.5 times larger than the number 2, right?"

"Yeah."

"That's a 50% increase. So a level 3 is about 50% stronger than a level 2. Make sense?"

She nodded.

"The number 50, on the other hand, is only something like 1.02 times bigger than the number 49. This is only a 2% increase. So, a level 50 is only about 2% stronger than a level 49, which is hardly noticeable."

"The percentage increase," he continued, "is what matters most when it comes to strength increase from level to level. Not the absolute magnitude of the difference."

This wasn't exactly right. The actual level-up system was much more complicated than that, but this analogy explained the general trend.

"In both cases, there is only a single level-up happening. But the percentage increase is wildly different. This means that levelling up in the early game is intrinsically more valuable than levelling up later on. Each level is worth more earlier on because the numbers are small. Make sense?"

"I see."

"It's something that won't hold true for very long. Once everyone gets their levels up a bit, even if I stay ahead in terms of actual numbers, the strength gap will be reduced."

Kirito would have to maintain the same percentage gap between him and everyone else if he wanted to maintain his clear position of superiority, and the only way to do that was to gain a ridiculous number of levels. To even keep the same strength difference he had now, he'd actually have to widen the level gap over time. Something that could only be realistically achieved by soloing floor bosses.

But this was unsustainable in the long run. He knew that, eventually, the players would catch up to him. But by the time that happened, he expected to have developed new capabilities for battling large groups of players that were dependent on having better equipment, abilities, and perhaps even new allocated skills, rather than having a massive gap between their stats and levels alone.

There were many ways to become stronger that did not involve levelling up that he had not fully explored yet.

But this was something that he did not intend to tell her.

"That actually makes a lot of sense," she replied. "So you won't be able to cut everyone's limbs off like that nearly as easily in the future."

It was hardly a secret that avatars got more durable as levels increased, and that durability tended to increase much faster than a player's strength did. So his rapid removal of everyone's limbs probably would not be able to be done again at scale so easily. It could still be done, but he'd have to be much more precise in his attacks and it would not be as easy as cutting through butter like it was now.

"Exactly. Even a month from now it'll be noticeably harder to do that. To win a fight without killing anyone then, would require more advanced tactics than wide-spread dismembering."

"What sorts of other tactics?"

"Like the sort you can read all about in Argo's book."

Kirito definitely wasn't about to start giving away any of his future plans to this girl so she can run around and spew them all off to her friends.

"But I want to hear about them from you..." she almost whined.

"And I want you to leave the room."

"Fine, fine, I'll stop asking. But if you ask me, you're way too secretive about all of this stuff. If you had just explained everything to Diabel and I earlier on, we both probably would have helped you out."

"And how could I have done that? It took me, like, five minutes to explain all the relevant information to you. Back then, we were right in the middle of a boss battle at the time and I had just stopped you from landing the killing blow on it. Neither of you were in the mood to talk."

"I would have listened."

The truth was, though, that Kirito had not anticipated the possibility that this girl was so unbelievably naive and gullible that she'd believe everything he said without question, instantly. If he had known that, he probably could have gotten her to believe him and the battle probably would have been unnecessary after all.

But because he had assumed that she was a normal person―with a healthy amount of skepticism―assuming that she would not believe him had been the best decision to make at the time.

To be fair, it would have been a tricky conversation to have anyway with all the minions around.

Hindsight was 20-20.

"Even so, it doesn't matter. I thought that the method I used would be easier at the time. Kicking the crap out of you and scaring you all out of the room, that is. Because I didn't think for a moment that anyone would be dumb enough to believe whatever I said implicitly and without proof. So, it was only a mistake in hindsight."

"It's not dumb taking people at their word."

"It can be."

"Anything can be, but it wasn't in this case."

"Look, I don't feel like getting into an argument about it, so we'll just agree to disagree, okay?"

"Well, that isn't good enough!"

"Oh, for the love of... I'm going to take your jaw off next, Stumpy."

The girl's eyes widened in alarm.

"C-can you actually do that?"

"I'm about to try if you don't shut the hell up with the nagging."

"Fine, then. Jerk."

She pouted.

"...You also promised you wouldn't call me that anymore."

"I lied."

* * *

**AN: Have a Nice Day!**

**Improvements:**

**Slimicee, Myrek, Black Silverclaw, _Sigravig_, Keepie, Infinity104, Sean Wales, Gabriella Gadfly, Jacob hatfield, B M,**


	20. Steppy

**Disclaimer: I don't own Sword Art Online or any of its characters. They are all owned by A-1 Pictures, Aniplex USA, and Reki Kawahara.**

**Discord: A3dTszc**

**(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)**

* * *

Kirito spent a moment going through his menu before rising to his feet.

"Where are you going?" Asuna immediately asked, a noticeable tinge of frustration in her tone.

She made no attempt to hide it. The other player seemed to enjoy leaving her on her own when she was defenceless. Asuna didn't understand why this was the case, but it made her wonder if he just couldn't grasp the concept that she was currently helpless.

"Over there," Kirito replied.

Asuna blinked. He hadn't remotely indicated where he was off to and had ended his explanation with those two words alone. He hadn't even gestured in the general vicinity of his supposed destination.

It became clear after a brief moment of silence that he had no intention of elaborating any further.

"Wow, that narrowed it right down," Asuna answered passive-aggressively. Her tone was filled with sarcasm and more than a little hostility. "Thank you. You're so helpful."

' _Where the hell is "over there"?!'_ Asuna screamed internally.

With her irritation at his ridiculously short―and totally unhelpful―explanation known, she expected him to change his tune and offer her a proper response as he should have from the very beginning.

"You're welcome," is what she got instead.

Asuna's brow twitched.

"I was being sarcastic! You didn't tell me anything!"

He wanted her to thank him for that answer?! She couldn't believe it!

"I answered your question," Kirito claimed.

"Did you really though?! I want to know what you're doing and why you're leaving me again!"

"Then you should have asked that."

"Okay, fine!" she huffed, deciding to just play along. "Why are you going somewhere else right now and leaving me here?"

"Who knows?"

" _You_ do," Asuna quickly pointed out. "And I would like to as well. Very much."

"...Well, I hope you figure it out someday."

Asuna narrowed her eyes, her suspicions all but confirmed. The other player was deliberately being obtuse just to piss her off. She growled when she realized that it was working wonders.

"You're the most frustrating person to talk to that I've ever met," Asuna declared.

He just loved to make things more difficult than they needed to be.

"Thank you," Kirito replied, sounding a bit proud.

"That wasn't a compliment!" Asuna squawked in outrage.

"It was," he countered. "I'm flattered."

"How could you have possibly interpreted what I just said as a compliment?!"

"You said that I was the best."

"The _best_ at being _terrible_!" she shouted, trying to make him understand. On some level, she knew that this was a losing battle, but she just couldn't bring herself to give up.

"I don't understand why you can't give me straight answers for even the simplest of things!" Asuna raged. "It'd be easier! And we wouldn't always get into these pointless fights over nothing! You can't even walk a handful of feet away without us yelling at each other over it!"

"Actually, it's just you that's yelling," Kirito pointed out.

"That's not the point! Nothing is incriminating about revealing what you're planning on doing wherever you are going! So why are you trying to be secretive about it?! I'll literally be able to see where you go!"

"Then why ask?"

"Oh, I don't know!" Asuna sarcastically exclaimed. "Maybe because I don't like how vulnerable I feel when I don't have any limbs because _somebody_ cut them all off?! And because my only source of protection is leaving me unguarded?! Honestly, I think it's a pretty reasonable concern to have! I want to know what's going on and if I should be worried!"

Asuna was breathless by the time her rant was over. Her only remaining fist was clenched, and she was hoping beyond hope that the other player would stop with his infuriating antics now that he knew beyond any doubt that she was angry at him.

"...There's a pretty easy way to solve all of those problems, you know," Kirito said.

In that moment, Asuna realized that the fight was far from over. Because _of course_ it wouldn't be that simple.

"There wouldn't be any problems if you possessed even the most primitive levels of human decency!"

Asuna was actually a little proud of herself for coming up with a retort so quickly like that―and so off-the-cuff. Though it was considerably more crass than she would have liked.

"...What was it that you were saying earlier about peeling my skin off with your fingernails?"

Asuna blushed, remembering the incident.

"―And ripping my throat out?" Kirito continued. "Tell me more about human decency. I'm eager to learn this from you."

"I-I didn't actually mean that when I said it," Asuna replied sheepishly. "It just… c-came out."

She would be chastising herself later for occasions like those―all of the times in which she had slipped up. She had ignored and thoroughly trampled upon all of the lessons in appropriate conduct that she had learned growing up.

Asuna had done that a lot recently. Forgotten herself. More times in the last hour than in the previous year, for sure. Ever since meeting this player again, really. He was a bad influence on her. Asuna didn't enjoy being dragged down to his level but it just kept on happening.

"―You're _really_ good at making me say things like that," Asuna grumbled.

"I didn't make you do anything," Kirito replied. "You did it yourself. And I wouldn't call what you did back then 'saying'. More like 'screeching'. Because that's more accurate. You're really noisy. Obnoxious too."

Asuna was seething by the time he was done.

' _Let it go, Asuna. Let it go. He's just trying to get under your skin again...'_

She tried to console herself by thinking calm and happy thoughts.

It didn't work.

"There also wouldn't be any problems if you―"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I know," Asuna cut him off, not even wanting to hear it. "You went over it already―God knows how many times. You don't like me, want me to leave the room, and are going out of your way to be as annoying as humanly possible to convince me into doing so. I know what your plan is, and why you're doing it, but I'm not going to do that for the exact same reasons that I gave to you earlier. I'm staying right here whether you like it or not!"

' _Especially if you don't like it,'_ the more vindictive part of her reared its ugly head.

"...then you have no right to complain," Kirito concluded.

"I have _every_ right to complain!" Asuna raged, beginning her rant anew. "Even though I know what your plan is and why you're acting the way you are, and that your personality isn't actually like this for real, you are frustratingly skilled at playing this off! You know exactly what to say to piss me off in every possible hypothetical scenario under the sun, and it's simultaneously the most impressive and the most infuriating thing that I've ever come across!"

Asuna paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. She wanted to lay out her next series of points in a manner so ironclad that they could not be argued against. She was determined, now, to get this player to see the error of his ways and change. Surely if she could just expose how ridiculous he was acting and what a troublemaker he was being, and if she could do so elegantly, then he would have no choice but to apologize to her and beg for forgiveness. If her plan went well, this next point of hers was going to put down the argument for good.

"I―" she began, before suddenly freezing at the sight that greeted her.

She couldn't believe her eyes. The other player… he wasn't even looking at her. He was staring off into the distance and scratching his head.

Asuna had no idea what to say about this.

After a few moments of outraged silence, the other player turned back and looked down at her.

"Hm? Were you saying something?" he drawled, lazily. "I wasn't listening."

He hadn't listened to a word she said.

Asuna dropped her jaw.

' _This… is what a brain aneurysm feels like, isn't it?'_

Asuna raised her only remaining hand. It was shaking. She clenched her fist and rested it on her forehead. Then she closed her eyes and tried to relieve the pressure she could feel building up in her mind.

' _How can anyone this maddening possibly exist?!'_ she thought.

She couldn't understand it. It ran contrary to all of her life experiences. It was as if she were trying to reason with a goat. It didn't matter how polite, level-headed or fair-minded she was, it was still a goat. It did goat things and made goat sounds. She had no idea how to make any headway like that. No one could.

' _It's impossible! Absolutely impossible!'_

Asuna had never come across someone like this before. All throughout her life, people acted reasonably. If she could elegantly and succinctly make a point about something in a conversation, it was supposed to be untouchable. You couldn't just… check out, and apply logic and reason selectively. That wasn't allowed. But that's exactly what this player is doing. He was only choosing to be reasonable when it was convenient for him. In all other cases, he was acting like a child. Asuna knew that she was clearly in the right about this player being a jerk to her, but she had no idea how she could make him see it.

"...Where do you come up with these lines?" Asuna eventually asked, a modicum of astonishment in her voice.

She couldn't find it in herself to shout. Not with the horrible headache she could feel approaching. She was closer to crying, actually. There was only one person she knew of that even remotely acted like this.

"Do you hang around with Argo a lot?" Asuna asked. "You're like her twin brother."

Her _evil_ twin brother. Because this player was worse than Argo by a wide margin. Way, way worse. Argo was an ant by comparison. She acted like a goat in a different way―a more light-hearted, teasing, lewd way. This player here was different. He was acting like the clumsiest oaf imaginable but had somehow honed this craft to be as sharp as a scalpel and as precise as a laser. Everything he said seemed to be tailor-made to maximize the agony of the one called Asuna Yuuki. This player was designed by God himself―placed on this Earth for the sole purpose of pissing her off. She was sure.

' _...But at the same time, I know it's an act!'_

She knew that this was not his natural state. Just minutes prior she had been having a reasonable discussion with him. What she saw now was a skill that he had somehow managed to cultivate, and she had no idea how. Asuna couldn't even imagine how someone would develop an ability like this, or why anyone would put in the time to do so.

' _Who do you think I learned it from?'_ Kirito thought with a small grin that was hidden behind his Mask ability.

He could see the frustration and the distress on the lines in this girl's face clear as day.

' _You can't be a friend of someone like The Rat for so long and not pick up on some things.'_

Kirito was sure that this was Asuna's first experience trying to debate an internet troll. There wasn't any doubt in his mind. But even he was surprised about how badly she was holding up. Kirito wasn't even trying that hard yet. These throwaway attempts of his to annoy the girl were pathetic by his standards. They wouldn't work on practically anybody. He had initially planned on starting out with these weak attempts with the intention to slowly increase the intensity over time as required, but somehow, he was instead doing significant amounts of damage to this girl right from the get-go.

She was so pure about it. Somehow, the girl had lived her whole life without ever learning that internet trolls existed. She didn't seem to understand that some people, on occasion, would deliberately pretend to be stupid during an argument or would otherwise argue poorly. And there were any number of reasons why they might. Oftentimes, it was to just piss you off.

You couldn't make progress in that sort of conversation. Both sides had to be acting in good faith for that. But Asuna didn't understand that it was possible to not act in good faith. Deliberately. Just to anger people. So she was constantly coming up short in this situation and was failing to understand why.

...But the girl seemed to be a glutton for punishment. Because despite these constant setbacks, she just kept coming back for more, convinced that if she tried just a little bit harder, Kirito would suddenly realize the error of his ways.

It wasn't going to happen.

"Argo?" Kirito asked, pretending to be confused. "Who's that?"

"Are you kidding me?!" Asuna raged. " _You're_ the one who brought her up originally! Only a few minutes ago! You asked me if I knew her!"

"Not ringing any bells, sorry."

"Oh my God! You can be so… so...!"

Asuna wracked her brain in an attempt to search for the right word.

' _Frustrating? Annoying? Infuriating? Exasperating? Vexing?'_

She couldn't decide on the right word to describe the situation. With nothing else to say, she didn't say anything. After a few moments, she tried to just drop the subject and bring the conversation back on track.

"So, are you going to tell me or not?" Asuna asked, praying for a little bit of mercy from the other player.

There was none of that to be had here, though.

"Tell you what?" Kirito asked, pretending as if he had forgotten the entirety of the previous conversation.

The girl seemed to be learning, though. Slowly. She made a single, feeble attempt to annoy him in exchange, as some sort of revenge. It ultimately failed, but it was an attempt nonetheless.

"You know… I'm going to just keep asking until you tell me," Asuna claimed.

"That sounds like it'd annoy you more than it'd annoy me," Kirito replied, seeing the problem with her plan immediately and calling her bluff. "Ignoring someone is simple. Pestering someone is hard. So you'd be working more than I would."

And that was how trolling worked. It was all about trading efficiently. You put in a small amount of effort to force your target to put in a larger amount of effort to deal with you. If you were constantly on the losing end of that exchange then you'd get burnt out first.

"For God's sake just tell me!" Asuna screamed. "You could have already explained the situation a hundred times in the time you've run me around in circles like this!"

' _Of course, I could have, but that's not the objective here,'_ Kirito internally agreed.

She still hadn't grasped that yet. Kirito wasn't trying to answer her questions. He also wasn't making her do anything. He wasn't 'running her around in circles', she was doing that to herself of her own free will.

Kirito was doing the equivalent of shining a laser pointer on the floor and flicking the beam around, and Asuna, like a simple-minded dog, was unable to stop herself from freaking the hell out over it and chasing after the dot with an unreasonable amount of effort and determination. At any point, she could stop the whole charade and get off the floor, but she just kept going.

So Kirito did, too, knowing she'd tire herself out eventually.

Asuna couldn't get out of this hole she had dug because she just didn't know how to step away from a situation and identify a lost cause when she saw one. If the girl was right about something, and she knew it, if she then came across someone who she knew was wrong about that thing, she just couldn't let it go. This made her the perfect target for a troll, and she stumbled into literally every trap Kirito set up. She just walked right into them.

Kirito had smelled this weakness wafting off of her the very moment he had met her and had filed it away in his mind. He was now ruthlessly targeting it and exploiting it to his benefit. Annoying her so severely that she just snapped and fled the room to get some peace of mind was ordinarily a stupid plan to try and run with. With anyone else, it would have been ridiculous to even try. But it had a real shot of working here with this girl because of the way her mind worked.

"You want me to tell you something?" Kirito gave his reply, playing dumb again. "Whatever could you want to know?"

"I already asked you!" Asuna screamed. "Why are you going somewhere else right now?!"

"I'm going somewhere?" Kirito asked, sounding surprised at the prospect. "Where am I going?"

"That's what I'm asking you!" Asuna roared.

"You want me to leave?"

"No! I want you to stay right here!"

"Maybe you should come with me."

"What a great idea!" Asuna sarcastically agreed. "Except I _can't_ on the count that _I can't walk_! Just explain what you plan to do, already!"

"I plan to go," Kirito calmly answered.

"Go where?!"

"Over there."

This routine shouldn't have annoyed even a 5-year old in Kirito's opinion, but Asuna screamed, furious at her lack of progress. It irked her greatly.

Seeing that the girl was sufficiently annoyed and just a few hairs away from snapping completely, Kirito decided to focus on his next objective. Making her feel as vulnerable and as unsafe as possible. If done correctly, that should push her the rest of the way over the line.

He was systematically targeting every single one of her weaknesses to maximize his odds of successfully extricating her from the room. Her extreme vulnerability to internet trolls had been addressed already. All he had to do to exploit that was act like an overly-dense moron. Now, it was time to make her think she was in real, serious danger.

Both of those strategies had failed in the past when he had applied them separately, but that didn't mean those ideas were a complete bust. Kirito now chose to combine the two approaches and perform them simultaneously. That might achieve a different result.

"See you later," he said as he started walking away.

Asuna looked like she was about ready to start pulling her own hair out. If she wasn't missing an arm, she might have tried to do this already.

"Are you ready to tell me why you're leaving yet?" she asked with a slightly crazed look in her eyes.

"Who's leaving?" Kirito replied as he continued advancing deeper into the room, away from her.

"You are."

"No one's going anywhere," he said, increasing the distance between them more and more.

"…"

Kirito kept walking.

A few seconds later, he travelled outside of casual speaking distance―around 30 meters away. They'd have to raise their voices at each other if they wanted to communicate.

Kirito could have told her that she would be totally safe on her own because the minions were too far away and that if they hadn't come over already due to all of her shouting, they wouldn't be coming over any time soon either, but that would reassure her. And that would be counterproductive. He had also already mentioned something like that to her a few minutes ago, so he ultimately decided not to repeat it. It's her fault if she forgot.

Lazing around while the girl slowly recovered was xp waste, too. He needed to keep grinding.

* * *

Asuna watched as the orange player walked away from her and started slaughtering all the minions en-masse.

In the end, that was what the entire argument had been about. If he had just said: 'I'm gonna go fight the minions, Roach. Be back soon,' all of that time and effort would have been saved.

But no. Instead, he had dragged the whole affair out for no reason whatsoever other than to spike her blood pressure.

Asuna sighed in disappointment. Most of her anger had faded away by now, and she was just tired again.

That exchange had been incredibly discouraging.

She had thought that she had managed to finally get through to him. At least a little bit, anyway.

Asuna had believed that they had gone through enough together and were now close enough for him to finally drop the hostility a little bit.

But this was not the case. Clearly. He had actually ramped it up. While the other player had agreed to let her help him recreate the conditions for Illfang to launch his mysterious attack, Asuna could tell that he was still extremely reluctant and pissed off about the whole situation. So he was still going out of his way to treat her like garbage, hoping she'd finally get sick of it and leave.

He still didn't see her as his ally. Instead, he was treating her like a thorn in his side.

Asuna didn't like that.

She didn't like that at all.

...But she wasn't about to give up, either. She had known right from the first time that they had met that she wanted this person as a friend, infuriating as he was. It wasn't just that she felt indebted to him and wanted to repay him. She would do that―whether he liked it or not―but they had shared a moment together that had sealed the deal. Several, actually.

Under normal circumstances, she was usually pretty reluctant to make friends so quickly. In the real world, she had just had way too many fake encounters with people. People looking to boost their status by being seen hanging out with her, boys trying to flirt with her, or people wanting something from her...

After experiencing countless situations like these, she had become extremely reserved and closed off. Never would she have imagined wanting to befriend anyone after a single meeting as a result. Especially without knowing a single thing about the person in question.

But this person had changed her. Fundamentally. If he had not shown up in that dungeon when he had, Asuna would have gone through with her original plan and would have killed herself. She had been hopeless and miserable, and then he had just… shown up and fixed it. Probably without even really meaning to.

He had been super rude about it, too. Her mind had been such a mess before their meeting and she had been so confused by his ridiculously over-the-top, poor treatment of her that something had just clicked in her head.

He had mocked her. Relentlessly. And it had been the first time that anyone had ever really done so.

It pissed her off a huge amount, to be fair, but it also helped make her realize that she actually was being a moron. She didn't have a defendable excuse to justify her actions. Being ridiculed had forced her to examine her beliefs in a way that she hadn't ever done before. She wouldn't have ever seen this if this player hadn't pointed it out.

She had been surrounded by people all her life that agreed with everything she ever said, no matter what it happened to be. She had nobody to offer her a grounded, second opinion. And when everyone took everything she ever said as gospel, she could never know when one of her opinions was dumb or wrong in some way.

Everything always followed the same pattern all throughout her life. If Asuna thought something was cool, everyone thought it was cool. If Asuna thought something was dumb, everyone thought it was dumb. She was the trendsetter wherever she went and she had gotten intellectually lazy as a result.

This was the conclusion she had arrived at.

She would form these half-baked opinions and just run with them without ever taking a second look and she had never noticed herself developing this deficiency until that very moment when this player had called her out on it.

...She certainly would have preferred if he hadn't been such a jerk about it, but there was something about the sudden, jarring, unabashed contempt and ridicule that he had given her that made her listen when she might not have otherwise.

A large part of it probably had to do with her _screaming_ urge to prove every single word he said about her wrong. She had never felt that need so strongly, before. But for some reason, this player's opinion of her mattered a lot. It was almost as if he was the first real human being that she had ever met. Everyone else was a sycophantic robot that she didn't care about.

This player was someone that she could actually talk about stuff with. Someone real who would tell her what he really thought even if that meant telling her that she was being an idiot about something.

So she couldn't just… let someone like this go. That was too valuable.

She had been so confused at first, about why she was so drawn to this person. But after putting in a borderline unhealthy amount of thought into the subject to try and figure out all of her feelings, she was pretty sure that she understood.

Every time she thought about this person, more reasons about why she needed him in her life in some role kept on piling up.

He had saved her, sure. He was real and would talk to her without any strings attached, too. But this was only the tip of the iceberg.

His utter refusal to be told what to do was the biggest reason of them all.

This constant, belligerent, refusal to cooperate that seemed to define his very being had caught Asuna's attention immediately. It allowed her to make some pretty startling, seemingly unrelated revelations about herself and her life in general.

...Seemingly unrelated revelations such as the fact that her parents had practically destroyed her mind with the way they had treated her throughout her life.

So these were not subtle discoveries, here. They were deep-seated issues that required some serious introspection. And she was still coming to grips with _that_ revelation in particular because she had only just come to it a few minutes ago. During her last, unwilling nosedive down that staircase outside, to be specific.

Asuna had lived an incredibly regimented life. Her parents were strict, and there were rules that she had to follow. She wasn't allowed to choose very many things about her life. She had to go to college, she wasn't allowed to have certain hobbies, she had little control over what she was allowed to do in her free time, she couldn't befriend certain people, and she wasn't even allowed to choose who she was going to marry. All of these things were decided for her by her parents, and she had no say in the matter.

...And that was just the way that the world was supposed to work. Asuna had never really noticed that something was seriously wrong with this picture until she had been shown that there was another way. She had never thought that openly breaking the world's rules was an option until she had met this player.

This person… he didn't let anyone tell him what to do.

Forty players had just shown up in front of him demanding his immediate surrender. Asuna had been one of them. He had promptly defeated every single one of them all at once, including her, single-handedly, and threw them all outside in a limb-less pile.

Then he had proceeded to do what he wanted, anyway.

It was only a technicality that Asuna had managed to trick her way inside the room in an attempt to stop him. And that had taken a ridiculous amount of planning and coordination with the other players and it had been the only victory they had been able to walk away with. If it could even be called that. There would be no genuine defeat of this player anymore. He had stopped it dead in its tracks.

And that was the point.

Asuna had never believed this to be an option. Digging in your heels and fighting back, refusing to give a single inch of ground anywhere and to live your whole life like that... This just hadn't been on the list of possibilities in her mind. If she had been in his shoes, she would have folded and handed herself over. Because that was how the world was supposed to work. You were supposed to listen, and do what you were told.

This person didn't. And at first, this had made him look like some sort of exotic, zoo animal to her. Because the amount of determination he seemed to put into getting what he wanted―for even the smallest of victories―was absurd. Asuna had almost found it funny to watch.

...But then she had thought about it some more. And she realized that it was precisely because he fought like hell at every opportunity that he was able to live his life the way he did. When he wanted something, he got it. Because he fought for it. The concept was only alien to her because Asuna never fought for anything. So she had nothing. And so she was stuck, forever at the whims of her parents and their decisions. She had been buried so deep in that hole that she hadn't even realized that she wanted out―didn't even know there was an out, to begin with.

She was the one that was trapped.

It was a bit silly, in her opinion, that she had drawn so many parallels between this random video game she was stuck inside and her real-life situation with her parents. But somehow, her mind had conjured up these ideas by going through all of these recent experiences with this player, and she was glad about it. Because if she hadn't come to these realizations then she never would have learned that she had the potential to improve her situation.

This player fought back with a level of determination that was downright scary, and he had gotten his way because of it. So what if Asuna did that, too?

She had been doing these little… thought experiments ever since. Wherein she would try and place this player into her shoes during some of the occasions in which Asuna had been ordered around by her parents, trying to imagine what he would have said instead, had he been in control of her body at the time.

How would his annoying, stubborn refusal, and unbridled snark manifest in that context?

She had been trying to imagine it ever since.

' _You are forbidden from spending time with those girls after school. They are nothing but trouble and have no future. They'll drag you down.'_

' _Go screw yourself. I do what I want. I wasn't going to before, but now, I'll go out of my way to befriend every single one of them.'_

It was utterly bone-headed, the amount of resistance he would put up to even the simplest of requests. So of course he would respond somewhere along those lines if someone tried to tell him what to do. He was a troublemaker. An unruly one at that. He couldn't help himself. And it was completely jarring when she tried to predict what he might say. Some of the things that she could imagine coming out of his mouth were absurd. But she could absolutely see it. She could hear his voice in her head.

The sheer, apoplectic rage that would appear on her mother's face if something like that was told to her was something that this newly awoken part of Asuna… sort of wanted to see now.

' _You're going to marry Sugou once you've finished college. He's such a nice man. He's the only person I'll approve of.'_

' _I've right this second discovered I'm a lesbian.'_

He just didn't seem to care at all about who he pissed off or how badly, and nothing was off the table.

' _How dare you! This is non-negotiable!'_

' _You're damn right it isn't. It's not happening.'_

' _I'll drag you to that wedding myself!'_

' _Put your hand on me and I'll 'negotiate' your teeth out of your skull, douchebag. You can't make me do shit.'_

' _I'll disown you and kick you out onto the streets!'_

' _Please do so.'_

This player, in her shoes, would have refused every request and every order, no matter how small. He would have refused and refused and refused until he became a veritable enemy of her entire family and being disowned.

But at the end, he would have been in full control.

Now that she thought about it, Asuna realized that _that_ was the worst that her parents could do. The absolute worst-case scenario was being disowned by her family, losing their support and any inheritance she might have been entitled to, and being forced to move out on her own.

That was pretty bad, but was that worse than being forced to marry someone against her will? Especially someone gross like Sugou?

Maybe she actually did have a choice after all.

This strange player had allowed her―totally unintentionally on his part―to see the light. Asuna didn't have to follow the rules anymore. She had never even considered just saying 'no' to her parents like that. Right to their faces. She had dreamed about it a few times, but that was as far as it ever went. And she had never properly internalized just how much she hated what they were doing to her. How controlling they were over every little thing in her life and what she chose to do with it.

It was hers. Her life. And she wanted it back.

All it had taken was this stupid, simple, unrelated example for her to make this connection―some random player refusing to back down despite facing impossible odds and beating up a bunch of other players in a video game. And this alone had allowed her to unlock this deeper truth about the world.

Asuna now knew that she did not like the way her life was currently heading. In a few years, if nothing changed, she was going to wind up a miserable husk of a woman that had nothing but regrets and an extreme amount of depression.

But there was a way to change it. And she could see it now. She could stand up for herself and do what she wanted in complete violation of her parents' wishes and without a care as to the consequences. The metaphorical equivalent of ignoring their orders, beating them up, removing their limbs with a sword, and tossing them outside in a pile.

Then she could do what she wanted, anyway.

...

This... was a beautiful thought.

...But that's all it was.

Asuna sighed wistfully.

Because she could only fantasize about actually doing any of it for real. Even knowing what she did now, she knew that if she were placed in front of her parents again, she would cow before them and follow every little order they gave, just like always unless something within her changed first. The resentment she had for them in her heart would be a little more noticeable, but that'd be the only difference.

She just didn't have the courage. Not yet.

...But if she could capture even a fraction of a percent of the spirit, the strength, the courage, the indomitability, the conviction, the willpower, and the utter refusal to cooperate that this person constantly demonstrated… then she could completely turn her life around.

She didn't want to be miserable and depressed about her future anymore. She wanted to break free from it. And this person had shown to her that it was possible. She just needed to learn how.

And _that_ was why she needed this person as a friend. He was a bad influence in all the right ways. There was no way that he could possibly understand just how meaningful everything he had done had been to her. Not yet. But one day, she wanted to tell him.

Of course, she first had to convince him that he didn't have to throw up a million walls between them whenever Asuna so much as breathed the wrong way in his presence―and that was going to be a massive challenge. But it'd be worth it in the end if she could find a way to do it.

It was just incredible being at his side. Her life was an emotional rollercoaster whenever she was.

Instead of the dull, monotone, grayness of her old life, where she had nothing to look forward to―getting a good education and good grades just so that she could be 'rewarded' with the 'opportunity' of marrying a creep that disgusted her―instead, her life was exciting now.

This player had pushed every single button she had until she exploded, furious, and he had made her scream at him. He had brushed her aside, manhandled her, humiliated her, and forced her to experience almost every single emotion on the spectrum as he threw her virtual body around like a rag doll.

...But then with her new, virtual body's seemingly infinite energy, she had been able to get right back up without a scratch. She had been able to engage in a fierce, screaming deathmatch where she was able to throw every last ounce of her superpowered strength at him, only for it to be countered and shut down in a way that left her exhausted on every single level. Emotionally, mentally, physically, and almost down to her soul.

And it had been so satisfying. Cutting loose and being completely drained like that afterwards. Some part of her had needed that. She had been holding all that in for a long time. It hadn't been very fun at the moment, but now that she had the chance to reflect on it all, she wouldn't change a thing about what had happened, even if she could. It was as if all of the emotions that she had been hiding away and suppressing her whole life due to her parents had all come out at once. And it had been perfect.

He had made her feel things again. So she couldn't let him go.

But perhaps most importantly, because he was willing to fight against everyone all the time for any reason, he was perfectly willing to become an outcast at the drop of a hat. If nothing changed, he would be seen as a criminal by all the other players. He'd be hated by everyone for stopping this raid even if it was to everyone's benefit that he ultimately succeeded in doing so. He would be hunted down in the future for the 'crime' of having the courage to sacrifice his own reputation for the greater good.

...And Asuna wasn't willing to stand by while it happened. It pissed her off that she seemed like the only person who cared about that. This player himself sure didn't seem to.

But it mattered. To her, it did. And she needed to stop it.

He had saved her life by being a gigantic nuisance and pissing her off. Now it was her turn to do the same thing to him.

 _That_ was how she was going to save him. By stubbornly refusing to leave his side―pissing him off in the process―until he finally learned and accepted the fact that she wasn't going anywhere. That she believed in him and was his ally no matter what.

She couldn't let him go.

...But he was still stubbornly refusing all of her attempts to close the distance. He was like a cactus. Prickly and unamenable. Resolute. The very traits that she so admired in him were working against her at the moment. To make any progress at all, she was going to need to get him to see her as something more than a nuisance first. Then it'd be a long trail of baby steps from there.

It'd be a difficult and extremely aggravating process, but she had an idea on how to start.

She first had to prove her worth. Even if only in a small way. Once she recovered her limbs, she needed to prove to him, with her actions, that she was on his side, and that she had really meant it when she had promised that she was going to save him.

* * *

Kirito became annoyed when he realized that his latest attempt to piss the girl off was not enough to convince her to leave the room. The girl was just too stubborn. For now, he decided to pursue his other plan. But the problem with it was that he couldn't think of a way to pull it off without Illfang doing his ranged attack again. And he still wasn't sure how that worked yet or how to get it to trigger. But it was his best shot.

He had other backup plans, but they were much more difficult to pull off and he didn't want to have to resort to them. They were a bit more extreme than simply making the girl feel unsafe, pissing her off at every opportunity, or acting like he hated her guts. But he'd resort to them if he had to.

He wasn't above these passive-aggressive, underhanded tactics because this girl was literally threatening his life simply by being there. Unintentional or not, that was unforgivable. She was coming between him and any possible future meeting with his sister.

This situation that Kirito had created for himself―being locked away inside the boss room with a real shot at soloing it if he could just get his plan to work―was unprecedented. How the next hour or so would play out would determine so much about the future of the game as a whole.

His window of opportunity was still open. He still had his chance. He just needed to follow through.

However, he didn't want to start probing Illfang yet until Asuna was on her feet. He didn't want to risk something crazy happening while she was unable to defend herself. So instead, he had chosen to start fighting the minions for a little while to get some grinding in.

With the minions' visual range being what it was, it was perfectly safe to leave Asuna where she was so long as he kept an eye on her.

So that was his plan until she recovered. Once she did, he'd begin trying to replicate the conditions of his previous fight in which The Swat had happened.

Since he had already given away most of what he could do in combat, he didn't care all that much about holding back his abilities from the girl watching him. It just didn't matter anymore. So he killed the minions as fast as humanly possible to farm some xp while he tried to come up with some ideas about the boss.

Illfang was standing at the back wall again with that same, singular minion at his side, and Kirito kept his eyes locked on the pair as he mowed down the other minions.

Now that he knew what was coming, he would not be taken off guard by it. The instant that Illfang looked as if he was about to do something, Kirito was fully prepared to throw himself behind the closest pillar, or onto the ground, to avoid it.

He wouldn't be caught off-guard again. And he would win this time for sure.

* * *

There were many different types of debuffs that a player could be afflicted with. Poison, paralysis, various damage over time bleed effects, slowed movement or attack speed―there were dozens. Perhaps hundreds. Despite these different types, though, they all functioned in a similar way.

Upon receiving a debuff, an icon would become visible in the player's vision with a pictorial representation of the effect that they had with a timer just underneath it that counted down. Then, once that timer reached zero, the debuff, whatever it happened to be, would vanish.

These negative effects, generally speaking, did not gradually fade away or get progressively weaker over time. There were a few exceptions to this rule, but they tended to be all or nothing affairs. You either had the debuff or you didn't. Special things needed to happen in order to get an effect that varied in intensity over time.

In any case, for most types of debuffs, this was an intuitive system―it worked like any other MMO. And nobody really felt the need to question how it worked. But for some effects, things got a bit strange.

...When a player had one or more missing limbs, for example.

This was also considered a debuff by the system and it worked in exactly the same way. When a player lost an arm, they received the 'missing limb' debuff, and that meant that they were stuck without that arm until their debuff timer reached zero.

Limbs did not gradually regenerate over time. They spontaneously regrew all at once―usually only taking a couple of seconds.

But there were some strange quirks in the process due to the way the system worked. Asuna served as a prime example. She had lost her three missing limbs at different times. She had lost her right arm during her battle with Kirito. Then several minutes had passed before losing both of her legs. Yet, despite this, Asuna regrew all of her limbs at once. There was no delay between regenerating her arm and her legs.

This was due to the fact that debuffs, in general, could be re-applied while a player already had one. If a player was under a 10-minute poison effect, they could still be poisoned again by that same poison. It would just cause the timer to reset.

The same worked for limbs. There were no separate 'limb restoration' timers for each, individual limb. There was only one, _global_ , 'missing limb' timer.

So, in Asuna's case, the instant she had lost her right arm―the first limb she had lost―a 30-minute timer had appeared in her vision just below a small icon. She had seen it when it first appeared, but she hadn't understood what it signified until much later.

It was the 'missing limb' timer. After appearing, it had ticked down a few minutes, uninterrupted, before Asuna very suddenly lost both of her legs.

But this did not create two, other, independent, 30-minute timers for those limbs. Instead, it had reset her global timer and all three of her missing limbs became tied to it. So, in a way, losing all her limbs at different times like this meant that she ended up crippled for a longer period of time overall, than she would have been had she lost them all at once―because each limb reset the timer mid-way through.

The length of the timer also depended on the severity of the injury. If your avatar only lost a finger for example, then the timer would be set to a much smaller period than 30 minutes. More like 5. But it still worked in the same way. The finger would spontaneously regenerate once the count reached zero.

The system was complicated even further, however, by the fact that only certain regions of a player's avatar could be amputated. It was mostly restricted to just the arms and legs, and a player's limb could be amputated at any position within those regions.

There was even a known exploit there that had been used a few times in the past by sadistic PKers. After removing all of a player's limbs you could keep them immobile for far longer than 30 minutes by periodically shaving another slice of them off when their timer was about to expire. You could amputate a limb again before it regenerated just by cutting a little bit higher.

Some of Kirito's... more extreme plans for dealing with Asuna involved making use of this. But he was hoping to avoid taking that route if at all possible. It would make him feel like far more of an evil asshole than he already was.

Due to the way this system worked, if you tried to do anything more extreme than a simple limb amputation―such as removing a player's head or cutting them in half at the navel―you would only cause huge amounts of damage to that player. You would not cripple them. Because those wounds are not within the confines of the designated dismemberment regions defined by the game developers. So, in some respects, and unlike in the real world, cutting off a player's arm could be a more devastating injury than aiming for a player's neck―because of the movement restrictions a successful amputation would impose.

Asuna had lost her entire right arm at the elbow. This was an amputation grievous enough to cap out the timer outright. It could not have been set any higher than half an hour. If she had lost her whole arm at the shoulder instead―what should have been a far more serious injury―it still would have set the timer to 30 minutes. Because that was the maximum.

This meant that 30 minutes after her legs had been removed, all her missing limbs spontaneously repaired themselves.

Five seconds ago, Asuna had been a one-armed, legless torso. Now she wasn't. She had all 4 fully-functioning limbs back, and she was able to immediately rise to her feet.

Even her clothes had regenerated. She had lost the right sleeve of her tunic when she had lost her arm, after all. And that sleeve had shattered into polygons along with that lost limb. But this had not been enough damage to destroy the piece of equipment.

The mechanics behind it were very strange. Common sense would dictate that because her tunic lost a sleeve, the item should be seriously damaged. Possibly to the point of it being unwearable―unless it was taken to a seamstress or a tailor to be repaired, anyway. But this was not the case. Item durability was the only thing that mattered when the system determined if a piece of clothing could be worn.

If an item had durability left, then it would 'adapt' itself to the user's current state. But those adaptations were entirely cosmetic. At no point had Asuna's tunic actually lost that sleeve. But the game had rendered the piece of clothing without one because it would have been weird if it didn't. If she had lost her arm but her sleeve had remained somehow, the fabric would have just dangled there uselessly. And then people would have asked about how the hell that had happened. How could a sword cut an arm off but leave the sleeve protecting it in-tact? That wouldn't make any sense. So the game removed it. But it only removed it graphically. It was still there. It just didn't load visually into the game world and it couldn't be interacted with in any way.

This, however, was not a perfect solution to the problem of how to handle worn equipment during limb amputations and there were trade-offs compared to other potential solutions. No matter how the developers had tried to handle this aspect of the game, there would have been issues. Just different ones. The weird properties of the virtual world would always manifest in some detectable way.

A particularly hilarious example of this weirdness involved Asuna's boots. Throughout the raid, Asuna had been wearing a pair of red, knee-high boots, a pair of white tights and a skirt.

...She had then proceeded to lose both of her legs at a point just above her knees.

That presented a bit of a problem. Her boots hadn't been hit by an attack. They were in pristine condition. But upon getting her legs removed, both amputated limbs had shattered into polygons―taking the lower half of her tights, and her boots with them. Her pair of _undamaged_ boots. They had almost 100% durability at the time. So where did they go?

They vanished from the game world. They were not destroyed, but they simply did not appear in the environment. The boots were still considered equipped, but the fact that she was missing her legs caused the item slot containing those boots to become disabled. They were still equipped and would reappear after her legs regenerated, but in the meantime, they just sat in a void, uselessly.

When the item slot was disabled like this, those boots did not provide any armour bonuses or passive effects. Additionally, if Asuna had opened her menu and navigated to her equipment page, she could have de-quipped those boots while the slot was disabled and sent them back into her inventory if she had really wanted to. Or she could have materialized them back into the game world as a held item. But unless she specifically tried to do something like that, those boots remained out of her reach until the moment her legs came back.

But things were different when a player lost an arm. If you lost an arm while you were holding a weapon, the weapon would not vanish from the game world in the same way that a pair of boots would have. It would instead drop to the ground to allow it to be picked back up again with the player's other arm, or so that it could be used in some other way.

Pieces of armour and clothing vanished when the limbs they protected were cut off, but weapons did not. And in the extremely rare edge case in which a player lost one leg and not the other―causing one boot to vanish and the other to remain―then it was handled the same way that losing both legs would have been, apart from one slight difference. The game would render the existing boot, but it would be entirely cosmetic. A player needed to be wearing both boots to receive any passive effects or bonuses from them. This meant that cutting off a single leg from a player was enough to completely disable any abilities that those boots together may have possessed.

Asuna had gone to great lengths to learn every single detail about how this system worked. If Argo hadn't explained it to her a few days ago, she wouldn't have known what to do. She probably would have been too nervous to ever venture out of the safe zone. Because there was one component of the clothing system that every player _really_ needed to know about. What happened when the durability of one's clothing reached zero?

Her tights in particular.

Asuna had just witnessed everything from her knee down practically get obliterated. That had come with a pretty significant durability hit to her tights. What would have happened had it hit zero?

Fortunately, however, you wouldn't end up in any sort of… inappropriate state of undress if your clothes were destroyed. Argo had explained this to her, and Asuna had double-checked just to be sure with a few private experiments in a sealed-off and barricaded room on the outskirts of town, in the middle of the night, just outside the safe zone where her items could take damage and she could safely test these concepts.

All players had a default set of clothing that could not be either removed or destroyed unless the player themself specifically dug through the settings and told the game that 'yes, I want to be in my underwear right now'. These default clothes were cosmetic only and did not give any bonuses whatsoever. They could also be modified to look however you wanted if you went to a tailor or a seamstress.

If all of your worn equipment was somehow simultaneously destroyed, you would find yourself in this default set of clothes, not in your underwear. So Asuna was not as worried as she probably would have been a week ago, upon seeing the durability of her tights hovering around the 10% mark. Her tunic had also taken a pretty big hit when the sleeves had been destroyed along with her arms.

In some sense, clothing that you choose to equip goes overtop of your default clothes even though it doesn't feel like it. When you equip a shirt, for example, the default shirt disappears and is replaced by the new one. So, in the off-chance that you wanted to wear your clothing in layers, one shirt on top of the other, then you had to manually put the shirt on over top. You couldn't make use of the Item Equipping system for that purpose and would not receive any armour bonuses as a result.

It was a surprisingly complicated system that not too many people seemed to talk about. Or if they did, they were like Asuna in the sense that they were extremely private about their concerns.

The system, for the most part, worked intuitively and could be forgotten about. But Asuna had just personally demonstrated―unwillingly―every single facet and edge case relating to it and was therefore extremely glad that she had taken the time to learn about it all in advance. Otherwise, she'd have been extremely worried about her clothes suddenly disappearing during combat. Now, though, these experiences served as a perfect, textbook example for how it all operated and her remaining worries about it vanished.

* * *

Asuna finally stood up on her newly-formed legs and began testing out her limbs. When she was ready, she drew her rapier. She glanced over at the orange player and noticed that he was watching her, clearly able to see that she had recovered.

Then he turned away again to battle the minions in front of him.

Asuna began to walk over.

"So, what's the plan now?" she asked, completely willing to defer to whatever he was going to decide.

Internally, she was hoping that if she acted naturally, the other player would not continue his stupid act and stir up another pointless argument. In an attempt to avoid that outcome, she was trying to take the initiative by being as polite as possible, pretending as if their previous conversation had never happened at all.

She prayed that he would do the same.

"...Think you can keep these things busy?" Kirito replied.

Asuna sighed in relief. It had been longer than 2 seconds and the other player hadn't started a fight yet. That was promising. She dared to raise her hopes a little.

"You want me to take over and kill them?" Asuna asked. "I can do that."

"No, I don't want you to kill them. Just keep them busy."

"Why?"

"Because when the minions die, they respawn in a more-or-less random location somewhere in the room. But I need to test out some things on the boss and I can't do that if a minion randomly appears next to me and jumps me because it was just killed and respawned there. If they are alive, they won't respawn like that and I'll always know where they are. I need you to keep them busy and kite them over towards the door keeping them all alive. As far away from Illfang as possible so that I can have some room to work. Can you do that?"

"Of course!" Asuna agreed without hesitation. "Leave it to me!"

' _Yes!'_ she internally cheered. ' _Finally!'_

They were finally working together to achieve something. A common goal. Asuna was elated and almost wanted to celebrate. She had been given an actual task that would help the other player in a tangible way. It was almost a miracle that they weren't at each other's throats yet.

Kirito watched as the girl leaped in front of him and deflected the next attack meant for him. He took this opportunity to turn himself invisible so that the minions would no longer focus on him, making it easier for the girl to lure them all away.

"No, don't go over there you lizard bastard!" Asuna shouted. "This way! Get the hell over here!"

One of the minions seemed to be a bit disagreeable, but in the end, Asuna managed to lure it away with the others.

Under his invisibility cloak, Kirito watched as the minions followed the girl to the other side of the room. He deactivated the cloak and spent the next several moments marvelling at the fact that nothing was trying to kill him at that moment.

The minions had been a constant annoyance and they just... weren't anymore. Someone else was dealing with them. Kirito had almost forgotten what it was like to have somebody helping him out and watching his back like this.

"Oh!" Asuna suddenly called out.

Kirito glanced in her direction.

"Hey… uh… one of them died," she warned. "So watch out."

Kirito caught the incoming mace without turning around and twisted the weapon out of the minion's hand. Then he performed a skill jump and spun into it, kicking it clean across the entire room, back over towards the girl.

"Holy crap, uh… thanks. And sorry. I didn't mean to hit it that hard."

"Don't worry about it. If this ends up too much to handle for you, let me know."

She was still a noob after all. Kirito began to suspect that maybe he had put too much faith in her abilities. She was fending off 5 attackers while having a conversation with Kirito at the same time. She was taking his orders, holding herself back so that she didn't kill any of the creatures she was fighting, and she was also making sure that none of the minions turned around and wandered off. It was a lot to handle for any player, let alone a noob.

"You can leave it to me," Asuna promised. "That won't happen again."

"As long as you let me know like you just did this time, it doesn't really matter if it does."

Technically, Kirito didn't really need her help at all with this, but it would make everything a little easier.

"By the way… I think you should tell me your name," Asuna said as she continued battling the minions.

She was remarkably casual about it considering what she was doing. Kirito thought it was admirable, but it was still nowhere near enough for him to actually treat her with any sort of respect.

"I'm not going to do that."

The girl was still a nuisance that he wanted gone.

"Then what should I call you?!" Asuna shouted. "I can't just say 'you' all the time! That would be rude!"

"You don't have to call me anything. We can keep doing what we've been doing this whole time. If you're talking out loud, I know who you're talking to. There's no one else here."

"But that's awkward and unnecessary! Why can't you just give me a fake name if you're so concerned and secretive?"

"Would that make your life easier?"

"Yes!"

"...That's why."

"...You are horrible," Asuna replied, astonished. "Has anyone ever told you that?"

"I don't care what you call me. You can make up a name for me yourself if you're that bothered by it. Actually, didn't you already do that? What happened to Chuckles?"

"I wasn't serious about that!"

Kirito chuckled.

"Suddenly gained a sense of propriety, have we?" he asked. "I find it interesting that out of everything that's happened today this is the thing that you think of as rude. Trying to kill me and ruin all my plans? That's A-okay. But calling me names? Ooh~! That's crossing some lines."

" _All_ of that was rude! That's why I apologized for it! And it's why I'm trying to make it up to you now!" Asuna shouted.

She continued battling the minions by the entrance of the room, making every attempt to contain them there so that the other player could have some room to work.

'"Kill' is also a very strong word," she continued, objecting to his word choice. "That isn't what I was trying to do."

"That's sure what it looked like to me," Kirito felt the need to point out.

"...Aren't you supposed to be testing things out on the boss?!" Asuna hollered back, fed up.

"I'm strategizing."

"You don't look like you're strategizing!"

"What does a strategizer look like, Roach?"

"Like someone actually putting in an effort!"

"I'm coming up with a plan."

"You don't look like you're trying very hard!"

"Probably because I'm not."

Asuna looked back over to the other player and noticed that he was just standing there, watching her fight the minions. He was even leaning up against one of the pillars, casually keeping half his attention on the stationary boss and the other half on her.

He was making no moves to confront Illfang.

"I don't understand…" Asuna admitted. "Why aren't you making use of this time? Don't you want my help?"

"I thought we already established that I don't."

Asuna spent the next several moments in utter confusion. It didn't make sense to her, at first, what the player was talking about or what his plan was. Why was he asking her to fight these things if he didn't need her to?

When she finally figured it out, her gaze hardened.

"Oh, I understand now," she said. "How could I have missed it before? You do this to me all the time, after all. You're wasting my time and waiting for me to get fed up and leave."

"That's exactly what's happening, Roach," Kirito admitted. "Good for you for figuring it out."

"For the last time, I'm not leaving!" Asuna cried. "This is getting old! Are you really just going to sit there and watch me fight these things until I finally decide to leave?!"

"Yeah."

Asuna glared at him.

"It isn't happening!" she proclaimed. "I will fight these things all day if that's what it takes!"

"Don't you hate fighting them?"

"You have no idea how much I hate fighting these things!"

Asuna deflected another attack by the minions before turning to face the other player. She was angry and was about to give him another piece of her mind.

"And you're―!"

She was suddenly interrupted when a minion tackled her from behind, bringing her down to the ground. Asuna's rapier clattered out of her hand and slid several meters away, well out of her reach.

The other minions wasted no time and jumped on top of the pile.

Kirito grinned.

"You alright over there, Roach?" he asked. "Maybe you should pay more attention to your surroundings instead of wailing like a banshee."

The minions were not creatures that you could afford to underestimate. They still had plenty of tricks up their sleeves.

Kirito could see the girl's HP bar, though. And while it was going down, she had plenty left. He resolved to himself that he would get her out of the situation if things got too bad. Until that happened, though, he was going to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

"I hate these things so much!" Asuna screamed, her voice muffled by the pile of minions on top of her.

She had no experience fighting monsters that did things like this. Asuna would have preferred if they had simply struck her from behind with their maces whenever they found an opening in her guard rather than jump her like this. At least that way she could have simply taken the hit, spent half a second recovering, and then continued the battle. But when they tackled her to the ground like this, they disrupted her concentration and threw her way off her rhythm and it was so unbelievably infuriating. She just couldn't recover from it. The monsters were so weak and easy to defeat by her standards but they had completely outmaneuvered her and caught her by surprise.

She had almost been on autopilot a moment ago before that infuriating player had distracted her. She hadn't needed to put in much mental effort to continue the battle until now. But like an idiot, she had allowed herself to get dragged down into another argument with that player and now she was stuck, frantically scrambling for a way to get out of her predicament because of it. What should have been a simple battle had been made exponentially harder because that orange player just couldn't keep his mouth shut and couldn't stop himself from making everything way more difficult than it needed to be, for no reason at all.

Taking advantage of her inability to move, one of the minions tried to bash her face in with an iron mace. Asuna twisted at the last moment in the tiny amount of space she had left. She was pinned to the floor but there was just enough room to slightly shift her weight. That was enough to dodge the weapon.

She watched as it smashed into the ground right next to her.

Constricted as she was, there wasn't much else she could do. She didn't have her rapier. And even if she did, she wouldn't have been able to use it because she was being squeezed from all sides. She couldn't so much as lift an arm because one of the minions was bear hugging her, and the weight of all the other minions was piled on top of that one. Both of Asuna's arms were locked at her side and she was being crushed. If her virtual body had needed to breathe, she probably would have suffocated.

"Need any help over there?" Kirito asked.

Asuna could hear the amusement in his tone.

She saw red.

"What do you think?!" she hollered back at him angrily. "Does it look like I have this situation under control?!"

She couldn't see the other player with all the minions on top of her blocking her view, and she could barely hear him. But the entire situation was his fault.

"Gosh, how rude," Kirito replied in an exaggerated, innocent tone. "I was only trying to help. No need to be so hostile."

Asuna let out a furious roar.

The other player was making it sound like _she_ was the bad guy here! She had a million objections to this!

...But before she could reply to this unacceptable injustice directed at her character, the minion that had attacked her a moment ago raised its mace and tried to do so again.

Acting on sheer instinct, Asuna jabbed her elbow into the minion on top of her as hard as she could before grabbing it by the helmet and shifting it ever so slightly to the left. This put it right in the path of the incoming mace and forced that minion to stop its attack. While that removed the immediate danger, it also created a stalemate. Asuna was lying on her back underneath the pile of minions, holding up the combined weight of every single one of them with a single arm. The position she had managed to wriggle herself into prevented any of them from attacking her, but it also made it impossible for her to do anything else. She couldn't get up, couldn't fight back, couldn't move, all she could do is prop up the pile of minions and stop them from killing her. She was stuck there in an impossible situation with no way out.

She wasn't going anywhere.

"Yes!" she eventually admitted. "I need help!"

Every word cost her. She _hated_ having to lower herself to asking for this infuriating player's assistance, but she couldn't see any other way out of her predicament. She was going to give him an absolute _earful_ when this was all over, but for now, if he helped her get out, Asuna promised herself that she would temper her anger slightly and make his life a tiny bit easier when she inevitably rounded on him later.

"If only there were a competent player somewhere in the vicinity capable of coming to your aid in these dire straits," Kirito gravely replied. "It's a real shame, Roach. Just one other player would have been enough to get you out of there for sure."

"Stop saying things like that! This is not the time for you to be making stupid, annoying jokes! Stop acting like you aren't here! You are more than capable of saving me yourself, and it would require next to no effort on your part!"

Asuna prayed to every deity that she could think of that this player would finally act like a decent human being toward her just this once.

"...Fine," Kirito replied.

"...Thank you!"

Asuna meant it. If this player actually came to her aid in this situation, it would be a huge step forward.

"Okay, listen to me very carefully," the other player's muffled voice came through the wall of lizard that was obscuring Asuna's vision.

She did her best to strain her ears. With half of her attention focused on keeping the minions above her in place, it proved difficult, but she managed.

"Follow my instructions to the letter and I'll get you out," Kirito said. "You have all the tools necessary to escape. First, I'm going to need you to open your menu. Can you do that?"

Hearing the seriousness in his voice, Asuna followed his instructions immediately, and without a second thought. She didn't know what his plan was, but it was undoubtedly better than doing nothing at all.

"Yes! I can open my menu!"

Asuna shifted the pile of minions on top of her as best as she could so that she could partially free her left arm and access her menu.

"Great," Kirito replied. "Go to your inventory. The item you need is in there."

' _My inventory? How will that help?'_ Asuna wondered.

She followed the instructions anyway, putting her faith in the other player's superior knowledge and experience with the game. She used her left hand to navigate through the menu while her right hand held up the pile of minions.

"Now what?!" she shouted, a bit impatient as she struggled to hold all the minions trying to kill her, in place.

Kirito gave his response without further delay.

"Pull out the teleport crystal I gave you―"

"You good-for-nothing, snake!" Asuna _screamed_ before she could stop herself, as all the pieces clicked into place.

His 'plan' was for her to teleport out of the room.

' _Who could have possibly guessed that this was where he was going?! He's only tried to get me to do that a million times, already! Who could have possibly predicted this?!'_

She had fallen right into it. She immediately started berating herself.

' _How is it that I keep falling for these traps?! Why do they always work?!'_

She should have known immediately that this was what he was up to.

"I am not teleporting out of this room!" Asuna screamed. "I want you to help me by getting these things off me so I can move!"

The orange player was easily strong enough to do this and could do so in literal seconds if he wished to. At any time, he could completely solve the problem. Asuna had seen how powerful the player was and knew that it would be effortless for someone like him. All he had to do was take 2 seconds out of his day and the problem would be solved for good.

' _Is that really so difficult?!'_ Asuna raged in her mind.

"This situation reminds me of an old proverb―" Kirito began, before he was immediately interrupted again.

Because _yes_ , apparently, it was too difficult after all. Two seconds was apparently just too much to ask.

"Oh my god!" Asuna shouted. "I don't want to hear another stupid speech! This isn't the time for that! Get these things off me already!"

"―something about beggars can't be choosers," Kirito continued, completely ignoring the girl's righteous indignation. "Twice now I've offered you my assistance, and twice now you've refused it because my methods weren't to your liking."

"It was the _same_ method _both_ times! You're just trying to blackmail me into teleporting! That isn't helpful! And _both_ of the situations you offered to save me from were caused by _you_!"

"Actually, they were both caused by _you_ , Roach. Never forget. You led yourself here with a long series of poorly thought out decisions. You're dealing with the consequences of every single one of them right now. Everything that has happened to you today, including what's happening to you right at this moment, is 100% your fault. You asked for it. All blame falls on you. All of it. I, on the other hand, am a completely innocent spectator. If anything, _I'm_ actually the victim here."

On some level, Asuna was almost impressed. She had never violently disagreed so completely with just a handful of sentences before.

"I knew what the consequences were going to be before I came in here!" Asuna shouted, struggling to hold up the weight bearing down on her. "But these aren't them! You have needlessly exacerbated everything and made it all way worse than it needed to be! I won't let you kick me while I'm down like this and pile all the blame on me! You have it exactly backwards! It's all _your_ fault! And it's completely unacceptable!"

"...Yet you can leave at any time."

"I refuse!"

Kirito sighed.

"Then I guess you're just going to have to learn to enjoy being these minions' punching bag for a little while. It's the only way you'll learn anything. It seems that they've taken a particular liking to you. You should feel honoured, really. You've proven yourself far too weak and useless to be anything more than that."

* * *

Asuna grimaced under the pile of minions.

The orange player saw her as too weak to be of any use to anyone. That was the only conclusion she could draw for why he wanted absolutely nothing to do with her. How could she claim to want to save him when she couldn't even save herself?

Asuna steeled herself, _determined_ to prove him wrong. She was strong and she was going to prove it. Right now. She would get out of this situation on her own, without anyone's help.

The only question was how.

She frantically looked around but couldn't find any obvious escape routes. She had no weapon, and she was doing everything she could to just stop the minions from attacking her while she was down.

No solutions sprung out at her. So she came to the conclusion that the only way to get out was going to involve getting creative, and probably doing something weird and unexpected. With all the rational ideas off the table, the only choices left were the crazy ones. She looked up at the minion hovering over her and in particular, at the thing's helmet. It covered its entire face, but it looked like she'd be able to take it off if she needed to.

Asuna immediately remembered how monsters had weak points and how one of the most common ones was located on the neck. This gave her an idea―the first decent one she had so far.

It was actually a terrible idea, but there were no other options.

She leaned forward as far as she could, almost as if she were trying to do a sit-up. This placed her even deeper into the clutches of the minion above her. It felt like she was being flattened by a steamroller, but she forced herself to bear with it. She leaned into the minion's crushingly tight embrace and enveloped the creature in a bear hug of her own. She snaked her arms up the lizard's back and up to the back of its helmet. She felt for the small opening on the back and dug her fingers into it.

Then she ripped the minion's helmet off, exposing its face and neck.

Having exerted herself tremendously―but having successfully achieved her goal―Asuna slumped back down into her original position.

With her left hand, she then grabbed the creature by the jaw to hold it steady, supporting the weight of all the other minions on top of it in the process. With her right hand, she made a fist, and punched the creature in the throat with as much strength as she could muster in the few inches of space she had to work with.

There was no pain in her fist since her body was virtual, so she could punch as hard as she could without any issues. She couldn't hit very hard with so little space, but she was able to inflict a noticeable amount of damage with that attack.

The creature's HP bar decreased slightly.

Asuna grinned before doing it again.

...And again.

She punched it in the throat over and over again until finally, more than 25 punches later, its HP hit zero and it shattered into polygons. It vanished, and all the minions that had been laying down on top of it a moment ago began to fall towards her to fill the newly vacated space.

But, for a brief moment, Asuna had enough room to breathe. She used this fraction of a second to spin around onto her stomach. She placed both her hands on the floor, and coiled up like a spring. Then she kicked backwards and up with all her might―as hard as she could manage with both of her legs.

She imagined that the movement would have looked a lot like a royally pissed off horse absolutely _blasting_ someone behind them with its hind legs.

The group of minions exploded apart from the impact as one minion slammed into another like a formation of billiard balls being blown apart. They landed in various positions all around her.

Asuna immediately rose to her feet with a look of astonishment on her face, surprised at her own body's strength. She looked around the room at her fallen enemies for a few moments before suddenly feeling a smile form on her face.

She had done it. All by herself. She had gotten herself out of that horrible situation.

She was strong after all.

A feeling of pride immediately welled up within her and she almost wanted to celebrate the achievement in some way. But before she could, she heard a sharp whistle from behind her and she quickly turned around to face the other player.

"Head's up," was the only thing she managed to hear before something soft and leathery struck her in the face with a comical _Paff!_

The sound was reminiscent of something being whacked with a paper fan.

Asuna hadn't gotten the chance to so much as say 'hello' to the other player before she was hit by whatever the item was. The object was large and strange, and Asuna had no idea what it could be. It had also startled her a great deal as it had completely blocked her vision and wrapped around the back of her head. She scrambled to grab onto the offending item and managed to pull it off.

It appeared to be some sort of giant plant―or a piece of one. Almost reminiscent of those walking plants back near Horunka Village that she had battled against a couple of times. The item was huge. Almost as tall as she was. And it reminded her of some sort of oversized turnip.

Asuna had no words to describe the situation. She was simply too stunned to process what had just occurred. She had not been prepared for something like this to happen.

She looked up, in disbelief at the other player and noticed that his arm was outstretched, clearly indicating that he had been the one to throw this thing at her. There was no mistaking this.

Asuna was speechless, rooted to the floor in shock. She couldn't imagine why the player had done something like this. It hadn't hurt her. It had done no damage whatsoever. But it was such a random thing to do to a person and it was so weird that Asuna didn't know how to react.

She was rooted to the spot for a full, 3 seconds before she finally collected her wits again.

Asuna opened her mouth, prepared to question the other player about why he had thrown something ridiculous like this at her when she was suddenly, once again, tackled from behind by a minion.

She hit the floor and the giant plant flew out of her hand and slid across the concrete tiles, well out of her reach.

In a moment of realization, Asuna understood everything.

It had all been a giant distraction. And it had worked. She had fallen for it once again, hook, line, and sinker. The orange player had given the minions another opening to ambush her when her back was turned by throwing that plant at her, and they had taken it.

It was so stupid. That plan was absurd and she hated it.

But it had worked.

All the other minions wasted no time and dogpiled her once again, dragging her back down onto the floor into the exact same position she had been in only seconds ago―underneath a pile of lizards, barely struggling to support their weight with a single arm.

She heard the other player immediately start to chuckle at her helplessness as she unwillingly served as his personal entertainment.

"Do it again, Roach," he said.

Asuna was furious.

* * *

Kirito stared at Illfang in quiet contemplation as the boss continued doing whatever it was doing. Silently standing on the far side of the room in its weird glitchy mode.

He just couldn't figure out what was going on with it. It was such a weird phenomenon for a boss monster to exhibit.

Kirito raised his hand and stroked his chin as he tuned out the unrelenting screaming that was still going on in his right ear.

Both he and Asuna were invisible together under his camouflage to avoid being attacked by the minions. This was because the girl had, upon breaking out of the minion dogpile a second time, marched right over toward him and started laying into him, giving him the third degree.

She had been at it for almost 3 minutes now and was showing no signs of stopping.

It was actually an interesting test of his camouflage. Because his cloak was trying to hide her as well, Kirito's Hide Rate was being flexed _hard_ as it tried to make up for all the noise she was making. It still held, but only just.

Kirito had stopped listening to her not even 5 seconds after she had started going. He just didn't care about what she had to say. He was a bit annoyed by her resourcefulness, though. He hadn't actually expected that she would be able to get out of that pile of minions. But she had. Twice. She proved that she was much stronger than he had anticipated. He had thought it was a fluke the first time, but she showed that it wasn't.

"...Are you even listening to me?!"

"Mm-hm," Kirito hummed lazily, nodding.

He wasn't listening and they both knew it.

Kirito suddenly drew his dagger and deflected Asuna's rapier with it.

She had just attacked him in a blind rage. This deactivated his camouflage and caused all the minions to suddenly look their way.

They immediately began to head over.

Kirito sighed. Then he glanced into the furious, fuming, burning red face of the other player and said the first thing that came to his mind.

"Why do you always cause so much trouble, Roach?"

Apparently, it was the wrong thing to say.

* * *

Kirito hadn't seen the girl this angry since that time she swung that minion around over her head. She had immediately attacked him with what appeared to be, intent to kill.

Kirito started deflecting and parrying all her attacks with his dagger.

" _Me_?! You think _I'm_ the one causing trouble?!" Asuna screamed at him, throwing everything she had at the other player, trying to land a hit. "I'm not the one causing trouble! Every bad thing that has happened today has been _your_ fault! You are the biggest troublemaker in the whole world! No matter how much trouble you think I've caused, you are a million times worse! Why do you always have to make everything so hard?!"

Kirito leaned to the side, dodging her last swing before roundhouse kicking her in the stomach, knocking all the wind out of her sails.

Asuna collapsed to the ground and didn't get back up.

...She _could_ have gotten back up if she really wanted to, but she had been getting so angry so often recently that she couldn't stay that way for very long anymore. She was emotionally exhausted on every level. She really just wanted the day to end so that she could go to sleep, so she folded the instant the other player had defended himself. She hadn't been seriously trying to hurt him anyway. She had just needed to vent.

Kirito immediately reactivated his camouflage, concealing both of them before the minions could get close enough to attack.

"...You done?" Kirito asked.

There were tears in Asuna's eyes and she sniffled, but she nodded.

"Good."

Kirito sat back down next to her and put his dagger away, considering what his next move should be.

The two of them stayed there, in silence, for several minutes.

"So… what's your name?" Asuna abruptly asked, wiping her eyes.

"We already went over this, Roach."

"Give me a fake name."

"Make one up yourself if it matters to you so much."

"That'd be rude."

"Do you really think that, after everything that's happened between us so far, that you should be concerned about how rude you sound to me?"

Kirito had been treating her like something he would scrape off his shoe, and Asuna was trying to stop all of his plans and had tried to kill him numerous times. It didn't make any sense that she was still trying to be polite.

"...I guess not," Asuna replied through her tears. "I would still prefer it if you gave me a name to use though."

"And I would prefer it if I didn't. See the problem? Make up something generic, I don't care."

"Why don't you just do it? That'd be way easier."

"Because I don't feel like going through the trouble."

"That doesn't make any sense," Asuna pointed out.

If she weren't so mentally drained she probably would have been shouting at him again by now. Instead, all she could do is give off a self-deprecating laugh. A laugh of misery.

"You're willing to go through the trouble of getting into an argument with me about literally nothing that lasts for several, hair-ripping minutes, and that makes no progress, but you can't go through the trouble of spending 5 seconds making up something for me to call you?" Asuna asked.

"You've finally understood," Kirito said, pretending to be awestruck that she figured it out.

"..."

Kirito turned to face her after her lack of a response, a bit surprised about how resigned and passive she was being. Normally, a comment like that would have set her off.

He figured it out pretty quickly, though. The girl looked miserable. She looked like she had just spent an hour bawling her eyes out and was now so spiritually drained that she just couldn't do it anymore. The tears had stopped, but her face was still wet and she gave an occasional sniffle. All in all, she looked like an emotional wreck. Like someone that was simply too tired to cry.

Emotions were hard to conceal in this game―much harder than in real life. But the girl wasn't even making the effort anymore.

In real life, if you were sad or angry, you could usually stymie those emotions to an extent if you really tried and could prevent them from showing up on your face. But because these virtual bodies were not real, they worked differently. A player only had limited control over what expression appeared on their face. If you were embarrassed, you'd blush. If you were angry, your face would turn red. If you were sad, you would cry. And there was pretty much nothing you could do to stop that. So the players out there that took pride in their ability to remain stoic in all situations had a pretty rough time, because their virtual body just wouldn't listen to them.

"You're impossible," Asuna whimpered, only just loud enough for Kirito to hear.

"Still want to _save_ me?" Kirito mocked.

It wasn't going to get any easier from here. Kirito wasn't about to let up on this no matter how miserable it made the girl. He felt pretty bad about it, but the way he saw it, she could put an end to the whole thing at any time by simply leaving the room and forgetting all about him forever. Any reasonable person would have done that long ago. But not her.

"Uh-huh," Asuna nodded.

Her stubbornness truly knew no bounds.

Kirito interpreted her response as tacit permission to continue treating her like garbage.

He clicked his tongue in annoyance.

"Nobody wants you here Roach. Go home. It's not going to get any easier."

"It's not about anyone wanting me here. You _need_ me here. You just don't know it yet. And I don't care how difficult it is."

"Then I guess there's no reason to talk about it anymore. Nobody's learned anything and nothing has been resolved. Cool. We're still in the same situation as we were at the start of all this."

"I'll outlast you," Asuna claimed.

Kirito nearly laughed out loud.

"No you won't, Roach."

If she couldn't keep herself together until now, she was going to have extreme difficulty continuing. Kirito would win in the end. He was sure.

The worst was yet to come after all.

' _I don't lose.'_

* * *

As Asuna continued stewing in misery, Kirito very suddenly and abruptly, got up and bolted, leaving the girl completely unprotected. He sprinted to the opposite side of the room and reactivated his camouflage before moving again to another spot.

There was no way that Asuna was going to find him now. She didn't have the Searching skill.

The reason behind this little maneuver of his was that Kirito didn't think Asuna would be able to hold up under another combined attack from all the creatures in the room in her current state of mind, so he tried, once again, to exploit that.

No longer under Kirito's camouflage, the minions immediately descended upon an exhausted, dejected Asuna.

Asuna gave a long-suffering sigh before standing up and defending herself against the onslaught.

* * *

Despite being hung out to dry yet again by the other player, Asuna refused to break. In a show of will that surprised even herself, she proceeded to follow the player's previous instructions.

She didn't kill any of the minions and lured them all towards the door once again to give the other player an opportunity to conduct experiments on the boss, should he wish to. She knew that he wasn't making use of the opportunity and that she was essentially wasting her time, but she wasn't going to give up.

As miserable as she felt, her determination hadn't faded one bit.

* * *

It took 56 minutes for Kirito to finally cave. He had kept track of the time by periodically checking the clock on his menu.

When it was clear that he was not on the winning side of this impasse, he finally deactivated his camouflage and walked over to the other side of the room to set up his camera once again. Then he headed over towards Illfang without a single word to the girl.

Nothing needed to be said.

Kirito had been watching Asuna struggle in utter futility. He had made every attempt he could to ensure that every ounce of effort she spent was wasted.

But she just kept going. She didn't kill any of the minions, just like he had asked, so she wasn't even getting any xp. She was basically just wasting time and energy for no reason. She kept them all distracted, holding the metaphorical door open for him for as long as it took, even as he stood back and watched, making a mockery of her goodwill.

Eventually, Kirito just had to concede.

It was extremely frustrating.

He had briefly considered making an attempt to set up some sort of campsite in the boss room, but had quickly dismissed that plan. The idea behind it was so that he could take a nap while Asuna worked herself to the bone. That way, upon realizing the person she was trying to help wasn't even awake, she'd finally just give up.

But this wasn't practical with another player in the room. Kirito didn't trust _anyone_ so he refused to sleep with someone else nearby, even if he was invisible at the time. There were also many other dangers if he tried to do that in a boss room that he'd have to work through.

Eventually, Kirito knew he would get tired and would need to sleep. And if the girl wasn't out of the room by then, he would be in trouble. Time wasn't on his side, he had realized, so he was forced to come up with a new plan. He had to take the initiative because the girl was too stubborn to give up.

He would need to get Illfang's attack to trigger after all. So he had set up his camera to get a good view, and started his experiments.

He closed the distance to the boss while Asuna kept all the minions at bay. The two of them made eye contact as he made his way over and Asuna smiled at him.

It was a genuine, happy smile that bothered Kirito a lot. He was acting like the biggest asshole he could possibly be and this girl was bearing it all with a smile.

It made him really uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, the girl had gotten good enough at fighting the minions that she had managed to avoid suffering through any more incidents. She hadn't been tackled or dogpiled again, even though the minions had tried to do exactly that several more times over the previous hour.

' _Why won't you just leave?'_

Kirito huffed in frustration before taking his final steps into Illfang's weird, magic range.

The same thing happened that always happened. Once Kirito was within the invisible radius, Illfang tried to back up. But, as Kirito backed him into a wall, Illfang suddenly started acting as he was supposed to all along.

The boss roared and charged at him. And once again, Kirito had no idea why this was happening. It just made no sense.

"Are you okay over there?!" Asuna immediately shouted from across the room, concerned.

"Fine," Kirito replied. "Don't worry about it."

He didn't understand why she seemed so genuinely worried about him. Not after everything he had done to her. It made no sense at all.

Kirito sidestepped Illfang's attack and vanished again, fully intent on getting Illfang to wander away so that they could reset their positions.

He wanted the boss in his weird, glitchy mode again so he could try something else.

...But instead, the boss turned towards Asuna and prepared to charge across the room toward her. By breaking him out of that state, Kirito had unintentionally caused this to happen. In hindsight, it made sense. _Of course_ the boss would go after her, she was the only visible player left.

' _Fuck.'_

Kirito deactivated his Hide ability and prepared to intercept the boss... but then he thought better of it.

What if he just… didn't do that? Would fighting all the minions and the boss simultaneously be enough to cause Asuna to teleport?

She still looked depressed and miserable enough for something like that to happen.

Instead of rushing to her aid, Kirito stood back and watched.

Asuna turned and glanced toward him and immediately noticed the giant floor boss rushing towards her.

She smiled a knowing smile. One that made Kirito realize that she had already planned for this exact scenario. She reached into her inventory and pulled out her teleport crystal.

...Then she threw it to the side of the room, well out of her reach.

' _Right, I forgot that she could do that,'_ Kirito thought. ' _She knows I won't do anything to kill her.'_

If she didn't have access to that crystal and the floor boss jumped her, she'd have no chance. Kirito knew this, and Asuna knew he knew this.

There was a chance, unlikely as it may seem, that this girl would sacrifice herself in her misguided attempt to save him. She'd throw her life away by allowing the boss to kill her just to try and make him deviate from his current path. And she would do it with a smile because _of course_ she would. Her personality was stupidly benevolent and angelic to the core. But if that happened, Kirito would never forgive himself.

He really didn't like this girl. She seemed like a great person, but she was trying to stop him. That made them enemies. But he didn't want her dead.

So Kirito raced after the boss and intercepted it after all. He charged in front of it and engaged it in a brief battle.

He was back at square one again.

He was going to need Illfang to do his attack. That was the only way to get the girl to leave. His final backup plan required it.

It was going to be annoying, though. More so than he had originally expected. Now that Asuna was in the room, whenever Kirito disappeared, the attention of every enemy would go over towards her.

There was a solution to this problem, though.

"Roach!" Kirito shouted across the room. "When I give the signal I'm going to need you to get over here!"

"Stop calling me that!" Asuna shouted back. "I am not a Roach!"

"Yes, you are!"

"I am not! I hate that name!"

"But you picked it out!"

"I did not! How could you possibly believe that?!"

"You didn't pick it? I thought you did. My mistake. Allow me to correct it immediately. Stumpy! I'm going to need you to get over here!"

"That name doesn't even work anymore! I have all my limbs now!"

"…This is why your name is Roach. You only had the two options, and one of them was removed. I guess we could go back to Steppy McGee though if you insisted strongly enough. But, I mean, you'd owe me one if we did that."

"My name is Asuna!"

"That wasn't on the list. So I'm not going to call you that. So stop being picky and get over here, Roach. Once I give the signal. Or leave, I guess. Either way works."

"Fine! What do you need help with? And what signal?"

"When I disappear to try and get Illfang to go back into his weird, glitchy mode, his attention immediately goes over to you because you end up as the only visible target. You're screwing up the boss mechanics with your presence. So when I disappear, you have to as well. We are going to need to vanish together every time."

"You know, it's possible to explain something like that without being a jerk to me!"

"You're just overly sensitive."

"Shut up!" Asuna shouted.

It wasn't true at all, she told herself. He was just saying that to piss her off.

"What do you need me to do?!" she shouted.

"When I tell you to, just start running over here. I'll meet you halfway. Then we'll vanish and hide behind a pillar until Illfang forgets about us."

"Are you kidding?! Why would he forget about us?!"

' _I guess it probably does sound a little bit strange.'_

"Monsters are dumber than you think," Kirito explained. "Just do it and you'll see what I mean."

"Okay… I understand."

"Good."

Kirito continued fending off the boss for a few more seconds before deflecting Illfang's axe and jumping back.

"Now!"

Asuna broke free from the minions and sprinted over towards him.

Kirito met her halfway. He grabbed her hand and then they vanished.

* * *

"Why aren't they looking for us anymore?" Asuna asked.

"Monsters in MMOs aren't very bright," Kirito explained. "They aren't programmed to remember players they have fought with in the past. That information just isn't stored anywhere. As a result, whenever all players leave a monster's sensory range, the monster basically assumes that all players it had been fighting until then are now either dead or have successfully retreated. This makes them revert to their default state. If one of these players then returns, the monsters treat them as if they are someone new."

"If monsters could actually think for themselves and strategize," Kirito continued, "we would have a lot of new problems on our hands. So this restriction imposed on their intelligence is for our benefit, to prevent the game from being too hard too quickly. In the future, monsters may very well start to do some of that, but here on the first floor, they don't."

"Okay… that makes sense," Asuna replied. "But why are we doing this now? How does it help?"

"You know how Illfang has been waiting around at the back wall for some reason?"

"Yeah."

"I'm trying to get him to do that again. When someone gets too close, he suddenly reverts to his normal self, as he just did a moment ago when I approached him. So we're hiding right now to see if I can make him do that again. I haven't tried doing this before and want to see if it'll work. It's an experiment."

"...And you need the boss to be acting weird?"

"He was doing it back when he almost killed me. And I don't know if you've noticed, but he _wasn't_ doing it back during your raid with all those players."

Asuna's eyes widened.

"You're right," she admitted. "He didn't do it then. But he was doing it back when Diabel was here. Why would that change the way he acts?"

"Well, the only real thing that changed between all of these scenarios is the number of―"

Kirito suddenly cut himself off and stopped speaking.

...Then he looked over at Illfang and started thinking.

* * *

It had to do with the number of players in the room. When there were only a small number of players there, only then would it be possible for Illfang to enter his weird, glitchy mode. When there were too many players, like back during the raid, it just wouldn't happen.

' _But why would that matter? Does the boss get confused somehow when there are fewer targets? That doesn't make any sense.'_

Was it even a glitch at all, or was it designed to be this way?

If it was a mechanic designed intentionally, why would it be? What possible reason could there be for having Illfang acting weird only when there were a small number of players present? The only time that would ever happen so early on in the game would be if a scouting party―

Kirito's eyes widened in disbelief as, for the first time, an explanation for absolutely _everything_ mysterious about the boss appeared in his mind.

It explained everything.

...But he did not like the implications that were involved.

Essentially, if his idea was right, this was another beta-targeting trap. A _vicious_ and _evil_ one that had been extremely successful so far. Far more so than anyone else in the game had yet realized. Kirito was the first player to truly comprehend the number of players that had been killed by it.

There had been quite a few of these sorts of traps already, but nothing like this. This one was on another level.

Kirito had always wondered why the other players hadn't scouted out this boss in advance. Back at the boss meeting in Tolbana, they had been formulating their plan entirely around outdated information from the beta test itself. There had been no first-hand information from this new version of the game shared there. It was all collected from Argo's book, which had consisted entirely of information that held true only in the beta.

But that did not mean that it still held true here. And Kirito couldn't have been the only person to at least suspect this as a possibility.

This had struck him as strange at the time, but he hadn't thought about it too deeply.

He was regretting that now.

The players had known where the boss room was, so why had no one scouted it out in advance? It was standard procedure to do that right before a raid, even if you thought you knew everything about the boss in question. There was no way that every single beta tester in the game had failed to predict the possibility of changes being present between game versions.

Someone _had_ to have scouted out this boss. There was just no way that it didn't happen.

...But for some reason, none of that information had made it back to the boss meeting. Not even a confirmation that Illfang still worked the same way. So Kirito knew that the possibility of a scouting party observing Illfang, finding nothing out of the ordinary, and then coming back for the boss meeting wasn't the case, either. Because they would have said something at the meeting confirming this. Instead, nobody had said anything about the current state of the boss.

To be fair, there were a few reasons as to why that could happen, but the one Kirito had honed in on was the one that struck him as the most disturbing of them all.

The possibility that every single scouting party had been wiped out by something.

' _Something like… I don't know, a mysterious ranged attack that shouldn't be there?'_

And this, if he was right, had been by design. It wasn't a glitch, and it wasn't an accident. Kayaba probably didn't want the beta testers to help out the newer players too much. So he was trying to reduce their numbers as much as possible.

This was a bit of an odd thing to do at first glance. If Kayaba hated the beta testers so much and wanted them all dead to prevent them from sharing their prior in-game knowledge, then why did he let them join the game at all? There were plenty of things he could have done to stop them from joining on the game's launch day.

Kirito didn't have a good answer to this. He didn't know why Kayaba was doing it. But Kirito did know that he was. There were just too many lethal beta traps out there for this not to be the case. Kayaba was targeting them.

So he had made traps that they would fall into. Ways of using their experience against them. To protect the integrity of the game and to stop it from being contaminated by those who already knew what they were doing, they were systematically eliminated in discreet ways.

The game was only a month in. New players had not yet had enough time to gain the experience required to understand why scouting parties were so important. As a result, every single scouting party that had been formed in the game so far had to have consisted entirely of experienced players that were smart enough to suspect that there might be differences between this version of Illfang and the previous version.

All of the smartest, most experienced players would have considered doing this. And many would have gone on and done it.

But this was the exact sort of player that Kayaba seemed to be targeting and wanted out of the game.

All of those players... they had all been killed. Right here in Illfang's lair. By the same attack that had nearly killed Kirito himself.

This... was essentially a conspiracy theory. Kirito had no direct evidence for any of it, and could not prove anything. But… if he assumed that this was all true, it explained everything mysterious, including the mechanics behind Illfang's ranged attack itself and how it functioned.

It explained too much for it not to be true.

If he placed himself in Akihiko Kayaba's shoes and gave himself this goal of wiping out these beta testers, ignoring the why's, then Kirito could see exactly how it all worked.

The scouting parties had to all be killed with an attack that was abrupt, sudden, and unbelievably powerful, or else they would see it coming. At the same time, it would need to only happen when there were a small number of players in the room. A small enough number that the odds of killing them all before they realized the danger they were in was extremely high. So he would not want this attack to trigger if there were too many players in the room. Anything larger than a typical scouting party would need to prevent the attack from taking place. Because if it didn't, and the attack launched when there were a bunch of people there to witness it, the odds of someone surviving for long enough to get out of the room would become too high. And if that happened, if someone escaped that death trap, then they would return with the information about the nature of Illfang's secret ability, and then the jig would be up. Nobody else would ever fall into it again.

Kayaba was using this attack, not to make Illfang harder to defeat, but to kill as many beta testers as possible. And in that sense, it had already achieved that goal. The lack of information shared at the boss meeting was evidence enough for this.

But there was one more thing to consider in this theory of his that had nearly blown a hole in the entire thing. It was a crucial detail that could not be overlooked otherwise the trap would not have been successful at all.

The Monument of Life.

All causes of death were recorded there. So if Illfang had a special ability of some sort, and if it killed a bunch of beta testers, it would show all of these players being killed specifically by Illfang right on the monument. And some people regularly checked that thing, searching for any irregularities like this.

If this theory was true, all these extra deaths would have been noticed.

But this hadn't happened. So for Kirito's theory to work at all, it had to account for that fact. But ironically enough, this detail had been the last thing that he had needed to paint a full picture. This had been the last piece he had needed to come up with a complete explanation for how the trap worked.

Whatever this ranged attack was, it had to give an ambiguous death description on the monument. Any cause of death listed next to a player killed by it could not include anything incriminating about what had actually happened to them.

Some descriptions fit the bill. Various, ambiguous death messages were sometimes displayed next to a player's name whenever something common and uninteresting had happened to them. Things like 'fell to their death', or 'was killed by a piece of the environment moving at high speed'. The former would encompass all cases of fatal fall damage, and the latter would include strange causes of death like being crushed by a falling boulder or being hit with a box that had somehow been launched by something.

But the point was, messages like this were generic enough to obscure the context of what had happened to that player.

You 'fell to your death' any time you took fatal fall damage. And that could happen if you screwed up when you were trying to climb something, or if you ran out of hope and decided to end it all by leaping off the side of the castle. These situations had a very different context but were listed as the same cause of death.

So, for this trap to work, it had to make use of this idea. Otherwise, everyone would have known by now. The ranged attack had to be listed ambiguously as a cause of death on the monument. It couldn't say 'killed by Illfang', as that would have informed everyone before the boss meeting that something was up and everyone would have suddenly become way more careful. And that would have prevented more beta-testers from falling into the trap.

This idea, along with some further observations about Illfang himself and what he's been up to all this time, were enough to figure out how this attack worked.

Illfang didn't have a ranged attack at all. He couldn't. Because that would have been listed on the monument. The boss had to be carefully skirting around the rules to get everything to work.

But after taking a look at the boss, and then at the minion that had been standing next to it all this time, it became clear. It was obvious enough that he began to wonder how he had missed it before.

Illfang was carrying a giant axe. It was Kirito's giant axe now, technically, but he had long since learned that Illfang would still attempt to use it as normal so long as Kirito did not prevent him from doing so. If Kirito left it on the ground out in the open, Illfang would pick it up and make use of it even though it wasn't technically his anymore.

This axe was the key component of the attack. Whenever Illfang had been acting strangely in the past, there had always been a minion standing right next to him.

The rest of the attack could then be visualized as a golfer at a driving range.

Illfang used the minion itself as the weapon.

Kirito knew exactly how it had happened back during his first fight with Illfang. When he had been fighting that group of minions when The Swat had happened originally, one of them had jumped toward him in a poor attempt at a tackle. Kirito had sidestepped it and then lost track of it as it flew off somewhere behind him.

A moment later Kirito had been sent flying across the room.

At that time, Illfang had used the minion like a baseball, and his axe as the bat.

Kirito hadn't had the axe in his inventory at the time. He hadn't yet owned the weapon. And he remembered leaving it alone on the floor after he had attacked the boss with that flying, spin maneuver with the nodachi from atop the pillars.

Illfang had to have then picked it up when Kirito wasn't looking. Illfang had thrown the nodachi―which Kirito had ducked under―and then picked up the axe while Kirito had been distracted with his battle against the minions.

Kirito had overlooked that minion back then as he had been busy dealing with the other ones. But those few seconds in which he had ignored it would have been enough time for the creature to throw itself into Illfang's makeshift bat.

However, to be fair, while this did seem to explain everything, the explanation itself sounded like it was bullshit at first glance. There was a reason why Kirito had not seriously considered this idea until just now, after all. Two significant objections could be raised in response to it.

The first was the sheer power behind the attack.

Kirito had been launched by the impact far faster than should have been possible. Illfang just wasn't strong enough to generate that much force on his own. So how could he possibly swing that hard?

And the second objection was that Illfang would have used all of this power against his own minion. There is no way that it would have survived such an attack. It would have been insta-killed and then shattered into polygons. So the minion couldn't have survived the flight over to Kirito's back.

These objections had been enough to prevent Kirito from seriously considering this idea until this moment. He had nearly been convinced by them.

...But he had just found a hole in both.

He really did not like how all of these explanations just lined up neatly with what had happened.

For the first objection―Illfang's unnaturally powerful swing―this one was a bit tricky to explain away, but it could be done. And it had to do, oddly enough, with the use of cutscenes in video games.

In SAO there were no cutscenes or cinematic transitions during battles or quests to force the in-game narrative along. It just wasn't something that you could practically do in a game like this. In virtually every other MMO that has ever existed, however, they did exist. Because cutscenes in games served a very specific purpose. Whenever a boss was doing something interesting, like transforming or charging up some sort of special attack, developers from previous generations of games would be forced to create some sort of cutscene in which the player had no control over the events that were taking place to ensure that everything happened correctly.

Oftentimes, during these cutscenes, the boss monster you were fighting against would display capabilities that it was not otherwise able to perform in the base game itself. Maybe it would lift some sort of giant rock that it was ordinarily not strong enough to lift. Or maybe it would display a degree of speed that it hadn't displayed at any other point in the game and that it would never show again. Or maybe it would summon a creature that it couldn't summon normally.

It was a necessary evil. Cutscenes. Due to the limitations of previous games and old computer hardware, they served a very specific purpose. Preventing the player from sequence breaking the game―figuring out how to mess around with the mechanics to do something they shouldn't be able to.

There was a common trope in MMOs that many gamers regularly liked to poke fun at. During the base game when they were in control of their character, they would regularly find themselves beating the hell out of a boss monster in a completely one-sided, curb-stomp of a battle. But then during the cutscenes when they had no control, their character would be getting their ass kicked and would be getting thrown around like an amateur.

But it had to be this way. Gamers were an unusually determined, versatile, and highly intelligent group of people. Game developers could not allow them free reign to screw around with the flow of the battle because everyone knew that given the power to do so, that's exactly what gamers would do.

Cutscenes stopped this in its tracks. If a boss needed to transform, then dammit, the devs were going to make sure that it transformed. And just to be safe, they'd lock the player from moving around or attacking during the process.

But there weren't any cutscenes in SAO, so none of this applied. This meant that if a monster transformed, or if it phased, or if it started to do something that the developers did not want the players to be able to interrupt, they could not force a cutscene.

So they needed another method to stop any crafty players from screwing everything up as they so liked to do.

The devs achieved this by literally attempting to make it impossible for a player to stop these actions whenever they occurred. Not by making the entity performing them immortal throughout the process or anything like that, but by making it far too dangerous for a player to even try to stop them.

In practice, this typically entailed boosting the boss monster to a far higher level of strength than it should usually be capable of for these brief moments. Only then would it have the physical abilities required to do what it needs to do, and it would revert to normal after the 'cutscene' was over. This would be enough to prevent any player from trying to stop what was happening while attempting to keep the game somewhat fair.

This had happened with Illfang back when he had phased during the most recent raid. When his health had been lowered enough for him to drop his main weapon and switch to the nodachi, there had been an SAO equivalent of a cutscene that took place. Illfang's capabilities had been boosted temporarily while he 'transformed' and he started flying across the room and bouncing across all the walls in a display of speed, strength and agility that it would never again demonstrate. And this was meant to stop the players from ganging up on it while it was preoccupied and vulnerable.

When you combined this fact with one other key observation, this first objection was eliminated.

Kirito knew that not all floor bosses were designed for specific floors in advance. He had read about it in one of the magazines he had about the game.

Back in the beta, a few of the bosses had been switched around between floors as the developers tested them out. As a result, before the final decision was made on where to put it―apart from a few exceptions―all floor bosses were designed to be roughly the same strength. When they were put into the game, however, only then would limiters be placed on them to make sure that they were properly balanced and scaled for their respective floor. But during the 'cutscenes' these limiters were removed so that the boss could do what it had to.

To program something like this in practice, the devs had made use of the Cardinal.

Floor bosses only had their strength limiters active when there was a player within range of one of their main attacks. If there was no such player in range, then there was no reason to restrict their strength. This would allow floor bosses to do whatever they needed to during any 'cutscenes' by a weird technicality.

During these 'cutscenes', all of a boss's attacks were disabled. With disabled attacks, it would be impossible for a player to be in range of any of them. So the system would remove the limiters until the attacks were re-enabled, which would only happen after the boss had finished going through whatever transition it had started.

If a boss was not attempting to use one of it's attacks on a player, then it did not have its limiters active. So when Illfang decided to swing his axe at his minion, Cardinal would have been monitoring the situation and would have seen that there were no players in range of the attack, so there was no reason to impose restrictions on the strength behind it.

It was friendly fire, after all. So what did it care if Illfang decided to kill its own minion? It probably saw it as a good thing and that it was helping out the nearby players by refusing to interfere if it even investigated that far at all.

Kayaba might have taken advantage of this weird gimmick in how the game was programmed to allow Illfang to do this. To have an attack so powerful that it could insta-kill players with no warning.

Or perhaps more disturbingly, Illfang might have just figured this all out by himself. Because just as Kirito could find ways to exploit the mechanics of the world, so too could the NPC's who resided there.

That was a terrifying thought.

There was some evidence for it as well. Because Illfang had carefully skirted around these rules once already in a tangible way. Kirito had only just noticed after figuring this all out.

Diabel had attacked Illfang back when it had been phasing during the raid, hoping to finish it off. During that period, Illfang's attacks would have been disabled due to the triggered 'cutscene' so it shouldn't have been dangerous for Diabel to do that at first glance.

But Illfang hadn't needed its attacks to strike. Rather than attack immediately, Illfang had built up a ton of speed by running and leaping around the room, seemingly at random, until the 'cutscene' was over and its strength limiters were re-enabled along with its attacks. Illfang had then taken advantage of all that illegally built up speed to land a blow, right as its attacks were re-enabled, that was far faster and stronger than should have been possible.

It was actually impressive, in Kirito's opinion. He had never imagined that floor bosses were creative enough to find their own exploits like that. That is, assuming that all of these theories of his were correct.

He was mostly speculating, after all.

But frankly, if all of it was true, Kirito saw it as pretty messed up game design. By default, these strength limiters should have been active all the time to prevent any sort of gimmicky attacks like this―only being disabled when a 'cutscene' needed to happen. Cardinal shouldn't have been designed to micromanage and observe every single attack that a boss dished out to see if it needed to be limited or not. It should have just limited all of them by default.

But at the same time, it sort of did make sense. Cardinal didn't necessarily know what was supposed to be a 'cutscene' and what wasn't, because the devs might, at any time, decide to make rapid changes to a boss―giving them new attacks and mechanics as they tested new ideas out to make the boss fight more interesting for the players, or to patch bugs. So if Cardinal limited the strength of an attack at the wrong time by mistake because it wasn't aware that the boss' behaviour had been modified, one of these 'cutscenes' might get ruined and a new exploit could be introduced. So rather than having to constantly update Cardinal's 'cutscene' database to prevent these conflicts, the devs tried to just make that system as robust as possible to handle all cases. So creating a precise, iron-clad rule tying Cardinal's enforced strength limiters to the distance between the relevant boss and the closest player to it had been created.

It wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it allowed the devs to implement changes much more easily―an ideal setup for a beta test.

To be fair, the developers themselves had probably known about this potential issue. There had probably even been a plan in place to circumvent it somehow. But after Kayaba's hostile takeover of the game, he had probably side-lined whatever idea they may have had so that he could create traps in boss rooms like this.

Kayaba wouldn't have had to do much of anything to make all of this possible. Just switch a setting or two in the code.

...And that was how Illfang could have possessed enough strength to make the swing.

Illfang could generate the required force provided that there were no players in range of any of its attacks. And it did this by exploiting the increased strength Cardinal gave to it during what it thought was a 'cutscene'. Because Cardinal didn't have a compendium of all boss 'cutscenes' to reference to double-check, it took a shortcut by making it's choice to place limiters on a boss based on whether or not a player is present within the radius of the longest ranged attack the boss could perform.

All a floor boss had to do to take advantage of this was to deliberately stay out of attack range of all players. Then all of its strength limiters would be removed. This explained why Illfang had that magic distance it tried to maintain whenever it was acting weird. When Illfang was 'glitched out' and Kirito got too close, Illfang backed up because it was trying to remain outside it's own attack range so that it could keep its limiters disabled and prepare to execute Kayaba's trap at a moment's notice. And that range was about 30 meters―the approximate distance of Illfang's longest ranged attack. A thrown nodachi.

Then when Kirito backed the boss into a wall and it could retreat no further, Illfang went back to normal because all of its limiters would immediately reactivate. It would be forced to be in attack range so the trap couldn't be executed anymore.

If at any point Illfang determined that the probability of eliminating all players in the room by launching it's attack a couple of times was past some sort of predetermined threshold, then it would do so. That, Kirito assumed, would happen if everyone was distracted and not paying attention to it.

It was not about winning the battle. Illfang didn't care about that. It was about preserving the secret of the trap. Illfang would rather die than let the players know that it could perform this attack at any time. Because maybe there were other floor bosses on higher floors that could do something similar. So if Illfang failed to kill anyone with his trap and then died, as long as no one knew about it, the next boss might still succeed with its trap. This was why it had used the trap on Kirito when he was alone, and had not used it on the players during the raid, even when it was moments away from death.

Kirito should have died. He _really_ should have. It was down to luck that he hadn't.

But some of those players would have escaped to tell the story if Illfang tried the attack on them back during the raid.

But while this all sounded great in theory, it only explained the first objection he had. What about the second one? A minion being struck by Illfang's axe with such force should have been insta-killed. So how had it crossed the distance between the end of Illfang's axe and Kirito's back?

Kirito had an answer for this, too.

For a minion to hit him _that_ hard, it had to have been launched with spectacular force. And that meant that it wouldn't have been in the air for very long. That was the key.

When an entity is destroyed in the game, the system does not remove it instantaneously.

Kirito could remember all kinds of situations in the past in which he had killed a monster, only for it to stick around for a moment or two as it played out its death animation. Only after that process was complete would it shatter into polygons.

During this period, however small it may be, the entity still kept all of its mass and kinetic energy.

Kirito could remember, explicitly, killing a Dire Wolf on the first day of the game in one shot only for it to fall apart into two pieces and strike the ground with an audible _whump!_

...Only a moment later had it vanished.

The mass and kinetic energy of a monster remained for a brief period even after its death. And this period was not short enough for a launched minion to have been removed from the game before slamming into Kirito's back.

Back then, there had been a race between the system's garbage collectors and the launched minion. Was the minion moving fast enough to cover the distance before the system erased its corpse from the world?

The minion had won the race. Probably by only a handful of frames. And it only did so because of Illfang's exploit that allowed it to keep its strength limiters inactive during the swing.

That was how it all worked. If Kirito had been killed by something like that, the Monument of Life wouldn't read 'killed by a launched minion' next to his crossed out name. It would say something more along the lines of 'killed by the environment', or something to that effect. Because the entity that would have killed him wouldn't have been alive. It would have had 0 HP and would have been waiting in the system's destruction queue to be removed from the world. It would not have been alive, so the system would have seen that minion as an inanimate object. That would have successfully obscured the details behind his death, and nobody would have ever figured it out.

Kirito could only imagine how many people had already fallen prey to this. It could very well already be in the dozens.

That left only one remaining question. What was the specific trigger to get Illfang to suddenly launch the attack?

Now that Kirito had figured all of this out, it suddenly dawned on him just how dangerous what he was doing really was. It was a bit like discovering that he was standing on top of a minefield.

Illfang could launch this attack any time it felt like it. And it just hadn't yet.

Now, Kirito had a few ideas on why it hadn't, but he couldn't know for sure without seeing the game's code itself.

One possibility that was a little disturbing was that, contrary to what he had told Asuna earlier, Illfang actually did remember him. Maybe it was being extra careful now that he was in the room because Kirito may very well have been the first person to be hit by the attack and survive it. So Illfang may be being extra careful.

Another possibility was that it was just waiting for the right moment to strike. Maybe all of this time it had just been waiting for every single player in the room to simultaneously look away from him and show their back―making them perfect targets to be collectively wiped out.

When Kirito thought about this possibility, it actually would make sense to him. As he thought back on all the moments in the past in which he had been near Illfang, there had never been a moment where nobody was looking at it. Someone was always watching the boss.

Except for that one time. That one time when Kirito had been alone and he had looked away. The one time when he had been slammed by the attack.

If Asuna kept herself hidden, and Kirito stepped out to face the boss, and if he then deliberately turned his back on it, would that be enough to trigger the attack?

Perhaps the better question to ask, however, is: 'am I willing to do the test to find out?'

* * *

"Uhh… are you okay?" Asuna asked.

"What?" Kirito replied.

"You just kind of… stopped talking for a bit. Abruptly."

"Did I?"

"You did."

"…"

"Did you figure something out?" Asuna asked.

"...I'll be right back, Roach. You should stay here."

"Okay. What are you doing?"

"I'm just going to check something out really quick. Nothing to worry about. Just stay back here and don't let any of these things see you. Get behind a pillar and stay out of sight."

"O-okay. How long?"

"Give me a minute or two. I'll let you know."

"Okay."

Kirito walked out from behind the pillar and approached the center of the room.

He quickly found himself battling against the minions again. But he had killed so many of the things by now that he didn't even need to pay attention as he cut them all down.

He had hotkeyed Illfang's shield earlier and was going to make use of it for what he planned to do next.

After making a small opening in the incoming wave of minions, he prepared a few times for what he was about to do. He visualized the hotkey he would be activating in a few moments and practiced the motion a couple of times. He imagined himself turning away from the boss for that one crucial moment, then suddenly bringing out the shield and spinning back around at just the right time to use it to block the flying minion.

All he'd have to do is not get hit. It was simple, really.

His expression was dull and uninterested as he batted another minion away. His heartbeat was slow. As if he were just taking a leisurely afternoon stroll.

' _I don't lose anymore.'_

He killed the rest of the group of minions, and just as they started respawning, Kirito suddenly turned completely away from the boss, making his back the perfect target.

For the first time since The Swat had happened two days ago, there wasn't a single player observing Illfang or what he was up to.

Kirito waited about half a second before activating the hotkey for his shield. Then he executed the motion he had been visualizing, spinning back around as the shield materialized. With his back turned, he had no idea whether Illfang had sprung the trap or not. Kirito's actions and timing had been guided entirely by faith alone. Faith that he was right.

He was about a tenth of a second early.

Illfang had indeed launched his attack, and the launched minion's face struck the shield with all the force of an artillery shell.

A monstrous explosion echoed throughout the room. Kirito had expected it, however. So he was far from surprised. Under such incredible force, Kirito slid backwards across the ground and if it had not been solid stone, his feet would have dug trenches in it.

He stopped sliding about 20 meters back from his original position. Then he peeked out from behind the shield as the dust settled, with mild curiosity.

Illfang still had his axe extended behind his back, in the final position of a golfer that had just fired off his ball with a driver, hundreds of yards into the distance.

' _That wasn't too bad, actually.'_

Now that he had been prepared for it this time, Kirito didn't see himself in any real danger.

He was, however, not the only person in the room.

"Oh my God!" Asuna screamed, having witnessed the whole thing. "What the hell was that?! Are you okay?!"

Kirito glanced over at her and noticed how worried and terrified she looked.

He was about to reply but noticed his HP gauge in the corner of his vision. Illfang had knocked out about 10% of it with that. So, he was still in the green, but just to be safe, Kirito quickly pulled out and drank an HP potion which brought him back up to full.

When looking back up at Illfang, however, he saw an unusual sight that made him frown. All of the minions in the room suddenly began sprinting over to the boss. They ran up to and clustered around it.

' _What the hell are they doing?'_

Kirito's question was answered when Illfang lowered his axe, only to swing it again.

' _Fuck.'_

What happened next could only be described by imagining a fully automatic artillery cannon, firing at a rate of about once per second. Illfang swung as fast as he could at each of his minions, launching them as fast as they spawned.

* * *

Illfang had gone _completely_ off the rails, launching the minions rapidly, one after another in the most broken, overpowered display that Kirito had ever seen from a floor boss. It was the single most dangerous attack he had ever seen. If something like this had happened during the raid earlier, every single player involved would have been killed. He had no doubt.

The boss had gone all-in, absolutely determined to wipe him out.

But Kirito wasn't too worried. Now that Illfang had stopped trying to be sneaky about launching his attack when nobody was looking, Kirito could see it as it happened. He knew where the boss was aiming and had the AGI to sidestep the attacks.

For a brief moment, he considered summoning Illfang's axe back into his hands. It belonged to him, so Kirito could easily do this. And that would stop it from being used to launch the minions.

But he ultimately decided that this wasn't necessary. With the girl watching, he didn't want to reveal this capability. He had already pushed his luck more than he liked when he had pulled out Illfang's shield in front of her just a moment ago. He had already put it away as he didn't need the thing anymore, but that was what he had used to stop the first minion. If Asuna had been watching carefully, she may have recognized it. But if she hadn't, then there was no reason to keep the shield out to give her more opportunities to do so.

Another possible way to get Illfang to stop was, counterintuitively, to get closer. By stepping into his normal attack range, Kirito could forcefully re-enable Illfang's strength limiters. The game thought this was a 'cutscene' after all.

That would actually serve as a pretty good test, too, to see if all of his theorizing was correct and that he understood everything.

...He'd do that later, though, Kirito decided. He wasn't the only player in the room. So his priority for now should be to get Asuna to safety, and to get her out of the room.

Kirito heard Asuna screaming something at him, but he had stopped paying attention to her some time ago.

He sidestepped another minion as it was launched and it missed him by inches, exploding against the pillar behind him.

In all the chaos that was going on, Kirito heard something unusual as the minion disintegrated behind him.

A _crack!_

Kirito took a moment to investigate the cause and noticed that the pillar behind him had been slightly damaged by the sheer force behind the impact. He had originally believed the environment to be indestructible, but apparently, this was not the case. He was only able to get a quick glance in, however, before he needed to refocus on the boss.

He sidestepped again as another minion rocketed past his right shoulder, exploding against the wall.

' _That is really annoying.'_

The sound of the minions smashing against the solid objects in the room was so loud that Kirito's ears felt like they were ringing.

Irritated, he decided to finally put an end to the farce.

He turned and sprinted across the width of the room, dodging another three minions along his way.

Much like the Nepenthes he was so used to fighting, Illfang didn't seem to know how to aim properly. The boss couldn't account for the fact that Kirito was a moving target and it was too accurate for its own good. Every minion was launched exactly where Illfang intended, but that intended position was always where Kirito had been a second or two ago, not where he was now. So the minions would almost always land somewhere behind him, posing no real threat. Ironically enough, if Illfang had been less accurate with these swings, the attack would have been more dangerous because the trajectories would have been much less predictable.

Kirito sprinted over to where he had set up his camera earlier and picked it up before running over to the girl. He kept the camera recording even though he knew that the footage was going to be a mess because of all the movement, but he didn't want to miss anything when he was analyzing the footage later, so he kept it on.

Without a word, he grabbed the girl's hand, activated Hide, and started dragging her further back into the room, away from the boss.

* * *

"He did his attack again," Kirito casually mentioned as the explosions continued all around the room. The entire room was violently shaking as if there was a terrible earthquake in progress.

"Oh, really?!" Asuna shouted back sarcastically, over the thunderous noise. "I couldn't tell!"

"You couldn't?" Kirito asked, playing dumb again. "You should pay more attention to your surroundings."

"I was being sarcastic!" Asuna cried. "Are you okay?! I can't believe you! That was the most reckless, idiotic thing I've ever seen!"

Kirito turned and took a considering glance over at Illfang as he continued rampaging, firing his minions all over the room.

"He is a little on the enthusiastic side, isn't he?" Kirito 'agreed' with Asuna's assessment.

"...What?" she replied, confused.

Asuna rapidly shook her head when she figured it out.

"No! I'm not talking about the boss!"

"You're not?" Kirito asked, once again, pretending to be confused.

"No!"

"Then who are you referring to?"

"Who do you think?! You! Why would I complain about the boss?! Of course he's reckless, crazy, and psychotic, that's what bosses do! _You're_ the reckless one I'm complaining about!"

"Oh."

Kirito had known, of course. He was just engaging in his new favourite hobby of annoying the girl at every opportunity.

"Well… thank you," Kirito said. "You're too kind."

"That wasn't a compliment!"

"It was very flattering."

Asuna clenched her fists but did not take the bait. She knew exactly where that argument was going to end up if she decided to continue it.

"We have to take it out!"

"You want to fight him when he's like that?" Kirito asked. "Good luck."

A minion exploded against a pillar a few meters behind them.

"Why is he _still_ doing that?! We're invisible, aren't we?!"

Illfang was randomly launching minions in the general direction in which he had seen the two players vanish.

"While monsters have a pretty short term memory, it isn't _that_ short," Kirito explained.

"Why are you so calm right now?!" Asuna screamed at him.

"We're not in any danger."

"We're in an incredible amount of danger! The situation is absolutely dire!"

Her point was emphasized when another minion exploded into the wall a dozen or so meters ahead of them, creating a shockwave powerful enough to force her into covering her ears.

Kirito started guiding her toward the back of the room again, away from the boss.

"It was more dangerous back when he was being sneaky about it," Kirito said. "He's just randomly swinging out in the open, now. It's predictable."

Kirito suddenly stopped and Asuna bumped into his back, halting her in her tracks.

"What are you―?"

A minion exploded against the wall right in front of them, in the exact spot they would have occupied had they continued walking.

Asuna covered her ears from the sound of the blast once again and winced.

A few moments later, Kirito pulled on her arm and they continued.

"If you can't handle something like this then teleport out."

"I refuse!"

' _You're so goddamn annoying, Roach.'_

* * *

They retreated behind the last pillar in the room, way in the back corner of the room. It was the closest piece of cover to the boss door, so Kirito had decided to bring the girl there as it was the safest place in the room. Illfang raged in the background, roaring and launching the minions around randomly. None of them were sent so far back in the room, though.

Kirito let go of Asuna's hand. The girl had been staring a bit too intently at their connected appendages for his liking, and had a light blush on her cheeks. So Kirito decided to go out of his way to make sure that nothing was going to be taken out of context. He didn't want her thinking that the gesture meant more than it did.

So, with a ' _tch'_ to demonstrate his annoyance, and with no idea about what the girl was thinking about, Kirito made a show of wiping his hand off on his cloak―acting as if the girl were riddled with cooties or some other terrible disease and that the mere act of touching her hand would cause it to spread if he wasn't careful.

"Your hand is gross, Roach. Do you sweat a lot?"

And just like that, the atmosphere between them was in ruins.

Asuna's eyes widened.

She was _horribly_ offended at this remark.

...Because it wasn't true. Her hand was in absolutely pristine condition. It literally couldn't be cleaner than it was. Her hands were completely, 100% sterilized. In this virtual world, players didn't sweat and there were no germs or bacteria. This meant that personal hygiene and skincare pretty much happened automatically.

You didn't need soap when you washed yourself―you didn't even need to wash yourself at all, technically. Your skin didn't dry out or get damaged so you didn't need any skincare creams or lotions. Your hair didn't get dirty or greasy over time so you didn't need shampoo or any other hair care products. You could use these sorts of things if you really wanted to but it wouldn't do anything. Every player was in perfect condition all the time and all the messiness that came with being a living, breathing human being in the real world was nowhere to be seen. If your hands got a little dirt on them from the ground, rinsing them for 5 seconds under cold water was enough to completely clean them off again.

Asuna understood all of these things by now, but like many other players in the game, she was still extremely uncomfortable with the concept. So she still made sure to spend a great deal of time tidying herself up even if, logically, she knew it wasn't doing anything. The habits were simply too ingrained.

This all meant that it was absolutely, 100% impossible―provably so―for her to be in any way, shape, or form, dirty. She had not been fighting slimes, and she hadn't stepped in any mud. And those were pretty much the only ways she could imagine in which she would end up with a slimy hand.

Kirito knew all of this, too. But he was banking on the girl being too much of a noob to know about how this all worked, herself. His plan was to target her right in her sense of self-worth. He wanted her to get nervous about her looks, make her think she was filthy and gross, and start doubting herself. Even though the girl was one of the most attractive human beings he had ever seen, Kirito had gotten the impression that, deep inside, she was a shy, nervous girl that, just like countless others, was incredibly self-conscious about her looks and made every effort to improve them as best as she could.

...But that was another avenue of attack. So that's what he did. With that simple gesture and a handful of words, he was hoping to punch her straight in the self-esteem. It was undoubtedly an asshole move, but Kirito was an asshole. So it made sense. He was willing to try anything to get the girl to leave, and this was a perfectly valid option on the table to that end.

But rather than wince and shrink into herself like Kirito hoped she would, Asuna did the complete opposite and rounded on him, furious.

"It is not dirty! I could slice open a patient and perform surgery with these hands! Without any gloves! Nobody sweats in this game!"

"...Tch."

"Don't ' _tch'_ me! You were hoping I didn't know that, weren't you?! I'm getting really sick of you treating me like this!"

"...Do you know how you can make it stop? You'll never guess."

"Let me try! By teleporting out of the room, right?!"

"How did you know?"

"You've been bashing me over the head with that idea for well over an hour, now! It's not happening!"

"Then nothing's going to change. So stop complaining."

"I am going to complain as much as I like, thank you very much! You make it really easy to!"

"Fine. Do it then."

"I don't need your permission! It will be my honour to continue complaining about you and your obstreperous behaviour!"

"What the hell is 'obstreperous'? You just making up words now?"

"I did not make it up! It means unruly! Disorderly! Rowdy! Rebellious! Unmanageable! Reckless!" she listed off in short succession. "Take your pick because those words all fit you to a 'T'! That's what it means! Or shall I go on?! I've got plenty more to add to that list!"

"Hang on, I actually like some of those. Are you sure they're all insults?"

"...Of course _you_ would like them," Asuna mumbled, frustrated that her insults were somehow being taken as compliments.

"Did you read the thesaurus before getting locked in here?" Kirito asked.

"Yes."

"...Wait, really? That's usually meant to be an insulting thing to point out. Why did you admit to it?"

"That's how you expand your vocabulary! Read a few new words every day!"

"That's how a nerd like you does it, maybe. But it doesn't work so well for insults. You're going to have to use words everyone knows or else nobody will understand what you're complaining about."

"I'm not going to follow your rules! I'll complain about you however I like!"

"Do it then."

"Fine! I will!"

Asuna coughed into her hand briefly, clearing her throat.

"I'm just going to check something really quick, Roach," Asuna mocked, repeating Kirito's words from earlier and even going so far as to deepen her voice in an attempt to imitate his. "Nothing to worry about."

That was what he had said right before sauntering up to the boss and getting smashed by Illfang's otherworldly attack.

Asuna glared at him and yelled another question at him―one that he had asked her a while back.

"How are you even alive?!"

"Stop shrieking, Roach. Use your inside voice. It's grating on my nerves."

"Then stop doing reckless things and maybe I will!"

"What I did wasn't reckless. I was in complete control."

"What a load of crap! It sure didn't look like it to me!"

"Then what did it look like to your expert eye, Roach?"

"Like you almost died! Repeatedly!"

"You weren't even watching."

"I _was_ watching! And what you did was unbelievably dangerous!"

"Danger is a relative term. It's considered dangerous for a 5-year old to fly an aircraft. No one would get on if a kid like that was in the cockpit. But it isn't considered dangerous for an expert pilot with 25 years of experience."

"...And some things are dangerous no matter how much experience a person has!" Asuna rebutted. "Drinking formaldehyde, for instance! Find me the man that's been doing that for 25 years! What you did was just as dangerous!"

"You're a moron, Roach."

She had no concept of getting good enough at something to openly violate the commonly-held perceptions on what was safe and what wasn't. Kirito knew what he was doing.

"The only idiot here is you!" Asuna hollered back.

It was as if he had no ability to assess a risk before he took it. No matter how reckless and dangerous an act would be, if it might benefit him, he would do it.

"Promise you won't do something like that again!" Asuna demanded, clenching her fists.

"No."

"Why?!"

"Why should I? I don't give a crap about what you believe I should or shouldn't do. I do what I want."

Asuna hated the fact that that was almost word-for-word _exactly_ what she had expected him to say. It was getting to the point that she could predict his replies. She could ask herself: 'what is the most frustrating, unacceptable thing that he can possibly say to me at this moment?'... and then there it would be a moment later. That very line would be offered to her by this player.

"You're going to get yourself killed!" Asuna cried.

"Even if that were true, and it isn't, it's not your problem."

' _There it is again! He knows exactly what to say every time!'_ Asuna mentally screamed.

It was completely unacceptable! She wasn't having any of it!

"Yes, it is!" she exclaimed. "You're my friend and I was worried about you!"

"We're not friends."

"Yes we are!"

"What's my name then, Roach? If you're my friend then surely you know something basic like that."

"I don't know that because you refuse to tell me!"

"Oh? What about something more obvious, then. What colour is my hair?"

"...What?"

The random inquiry threw her off.

"You have to know _that_ at least," Kirito pressed. "What sort of friend doesn't even know basic facts about what you look like?"

"You're hiding your entire body behind that stupid cloak so how can I possibly know that?!"

"So you don't know who I am, what I look like, or anything else about me. Not even simple basic facts like when my birthday is. You know nothing about me. So how could you possibly believe us to be friends? Like I said earlier, friendship is a two-way street. And I don't want to be your friend, Roach."

"Okay. Okay… fine. We don't have to be friends. Yet. We can work on that later. And we _will_ work on that later, understand? 'No' is not an acceptable answer. But for now, I'm willing to leave that aside until later. For now, we need to work together. We have to take out this boss. I can't believe that he was holding something like this back from us the whole time."

Illfang was still swinging away in the background, slaughtering his minions and launching them randomly. It was causing quite a racket and was part of the reason why Asuna was raising her voice so often at this orange player. To be heard over the background noise.

"And how do you expect to do that?" Kirito asked.

"I don't know, okay?! This was so much easier back when the boss wasn't acting like a lunatic! Don't you have a plan?!"

"No."

"W-what?"

"My plan already succeeded. I got video footage of Illfang's attack, and no longer care about what happens to him."

"But…what about what you said earlier? About joining the next raid?"

"I lied."

"You…lied?" Asuna repeated, unable to understand. "Why?"

"To get you to shut up, mostly."

Asuna blinked.

"But… No!" she shouted. "You can't do that! That's not allowed! You promised!"

"I lied."

"But we'll never be able to win without you!"

"Bullshit. You were doing just fine during the last raid before I intervened."

Asuna didn't know how to handle this revelation. The player had given her his word that he would help... just so that she would stop badgering him about it?

That was completely childish.

Asuna, desperate to save the situation, suddenly knelt in front of the other player and grabbed his hand in a position almost reminiscent of a wedding proposal. Only, she would have been the one proposing to him if that were what was actually happening.

"We need your help," she pleaded, hoping he would see reason.

"No, you don't," Kirito denied.

"Do you have any idea how _easy_ this fight would be if you took part in it?"

"Do you have any idea how _hard_ this fight would be if I had to watch my back constantly from all the other players trying to kill me?"

"That won't happen!"

"It will."

Asuna narrowed her eyes.

"It won't. I'll make sure of it. If anyone gives you any trouble, I'll set them straight."

"You would single-handedly fight the entire rest of the raid group on my behalf? Why?"

"Because you're my friend!"

"I am no closer to believing that now than I was 30 seconds ago."

"What can I do to prove it?! I'll do anything!"

"Why are you going to such lengths? You don't know me."

"I know you well enough! And I won't be facing the entire rest of the raid group alone! I'm sure I can convince both Diabel and Agil to take our side."

"That's amazing!" Kirito said, sounding taken aback and awed by the suggestion.

Asuna suddenly perked up, thinking that she was finally on her way to convincing him.

...But then he continued.

"So instead of it being 1 against 40, it's now 3 against 40. I am so relieved."

The way he said this dashed Asuna's hopes completely before they could even get all the way up. He definitely wasn't convinced. He was actually mocking her.

"Four!" Asuna shouted.

"What?"

" _Four_ people if we include you! Five if we count Argo!"

"Argo wouldn't take my side."

"But she _would_ take _my_ side! And _I'd_ be able to convince her!"

"I thought you said she wasn't your friend?"

"I was mostly just… venting back then. She can be extremely hard to handle at times and is an open pervert, but we're close enough for me to be sure that she'll take my side in this."

Asuna wasn't actually sure where she sat with Argo. They had spent some time together, but most of that time had been filled with strange, confusing events. Argo was very weird, after all. So Asuna hadn't been able to interpret what their time together meant, yet. So she didn't know if they were friends. Perhaps 'acquaintances' was the better term.

"...So it's 5 against 40," Kirito summarized.

"Numbers don't matter! Didn't you just prove that?! You alone brought down the entire raid group! I don't know if you've realized it yet, but those people outside… are _terrified_ of fighting you again! If you join forces with me and everyone else I just mentioned, and if we explain the situation and why you stopped the raid, and if you show that video of Illfang's attack to everyone, they'll all understand!"

Asuna stood up again and continued her plea for help.

"You're not alone in this! You don't have to live as an outcast or a criminal! We're all people! The players outside, they aren't all nameless, faceless enemies that are all out to get you! Each one of them can think for themselves! Your plan made sense! It was perhaps a bit misguided to try and do everything all on your own without explaining it to anyone, but the threat you were trying to uncover was real! You were right! And the players out there will believe it too if you just take the time to explain it to them!"

Asuna pinched the bridge of her nose to try and stave off her headache. There was just no end to the emotional rollercoaster and it was causing a constant, aching pain behind her forehead.

"Why can't you see that?" she asked. "Why can't we all just… work together? Don't we all want to escape? Why do we have to fight each other?"

Asuna leaned against the pillar, sighed, and slumped down to the ground.

"Could you imagine?" she continued. "How easy we could progress through these floors if everyone in the raid group was unified under a leader as strong as you? If we all worked together, the game would be so easy to win and then we could all just go home."

Kirito sat down several feet away.

"That's quite the rosy picture you're painting," he said. "It isn't that easy."

"No, you're right," Asuna agreed. "It'll be hard. But everyone will be better off for it."

"Only if it works."

"It'll work," Asuna insisted. "Just… have some more faith in us. Everyone just wants to log out. And we're all trying to do what we think is right. It'll be hard, but I'm confident that everyone will make the right choice in the end. It isn't too late to come back with me."

Kirito stared at the girl for a long time and started reflecting on what she was trying to say.

He hadn't considered trying to just… be open about everything. To explain to everyone why his cursor was orange. Not seriously, anyway. That it had been an accident and he hadn't meant to kill that person.

...Was it possible that someone might understand?

Kirito looked up at the ceiling. For the next minute or so, he just… thought about the things Asuna had said.

He was interrupted when he felt something on his left shoulder. Kirito turned to look and raised an eyebrow.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"...What does it look like I'm doing?"

"It looks like you're invading my personal space. Do you always get this close to random guys you barely know?"

"You're not a random guy. I know you well. And personal space doesn't matter between friends."

"Only an idiot would think like that. It actually matters a lot. Also, we're not friends."

"Stop saying that! We are! You're just too stubborn to admit it! But deep down, we both know the truth! "

"…"

"I'm not going anywhere, you know," Asuna declared.

The girl had slid over to him and was now resting her head on his shoulder like those cutesy couples did in anime and on TV shows.

Kirito had never been this close to a girl before―other than his sister anyway. But that was a long time ago.

He found the situation pretty ironic. Back when he had been a friendly, kind, normal kid just living his day-to-day life in the outside world, nothing like this had ever happened. But now that he was acting like a horrible asshole, this girl wouldn't leave him alone. No matter how hard he tried to get her to leave, she just kept coming back for more. On some level, it was almost as if she _enjoyed_ being abused. Kirito wouldn't have put up with half of the things he had put this girl through. All of his efforts were backfiring.

She was tenacious and had an iron will.

...More stubborn than a goat, too.

' _What if I actually did go with her?'_ Kirito thought to himself, entertaining the idea.

If he went back and worked with her, she'd prove to be one hell of an ally in the future. Her potential was incredible and he knew it. But it could only be exploited if everything went the way she said that it would. Before they could do anything, Kirito would have to explain his orange cursor to the other players and he'd have to be accepted by them.

Kirito started to think.

"Since, according to you, friends are supposed to know basic facts about each other," Asuna began, "my real name is Asuna Yuuki. My birthday is on September 30th―"

"Literally no one cares."

"―H-hey! I wasn't finished!"

"Your real name is Roach, or whatever the hell I feel like it is at any given moment. Your birthday is irrelevant, as no one cares about when an insect is born, and the only thing unique about your existence is that you are clingier than a…"

Kirito paused.

"...Than a what?" Asuna prompted with crossed arms and an unimpressed look. "Finish it. I want to hear the rest."

"...Hang on a sec, I'm trying to think of something with a suitable level of clinginess to describe you. It's actually pretty difficult."

"You're going to have to try harder than this if you want to offend me," she said. "Being called clingy isn't even insulting. You're my friend, so why wouldn't I stand by your side at every opportunity that I can? Friends support each other no matter what! Call it what you want but I'm proud of myself for refusing to leave your side despite the ridiculous lengths you are going through to try and make it happen! So yeah. I'm clingy. And proud of it. You can't insult me that way."

Asuna looked away with a ' _hmph!',_ figuring the matter to be settled.

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

' _That's one hell of a shouting match going on up there,'_ Argo thought to herself as she slowly made her way up the staircase to Illfang's lair. She was only halfway to the top and already she could hear dozens of players angrily screaming at each other.

She was not looking forward to this. Not at all. But it needed to be done. Somehow, the whole raid had been derailed by a single player and rumours were already flying about it. About half an hour ago, she had received a message from Diabel about how they were trying to capture an orange player who was interfering with their battle and this had immediately caught her attention.

Orange players had the potential to be much more dangerous in this new world than back in the beta. Especially unknown ones with high combat proficiency. So Argo had been more than willing to do her part to help everyone out with his capture. She had mobilized a small part of her web, and her task had been to watch the teleport gate in case the player tried to flee, as everyone else supposedly had him pinned down in the boss room and teleporting was his only way out.

No one had ever shown up, though. And then, after a few more minutes had passed, she had gotten another message about how that single orange player had somehow defeated the whole raid party and had locked himself inside the boss room.

This was a ridiculous turn of events that no one had seen coming. How any player could possibly be strong enough to do something like that was beyond her. She had a million questions now about what had happened and she wasn't the only one. Hundreds of other players had already heard small tidbits of news about the failed raid and now everyone wanted to know about what had happened. So Argo was on her way to find out.

That player _needed_ to be captured and interrogated.

Diabel was trying to set up another meeting and practically every front line player had been invited to it. The goal was to share information and try to figure out what the hell had happened. He also wanted to come up with some sort of plan moving forwards.

But as Argo continued listening to the screaming match from atop the stairs―players throwing blame around at each other, mostly―she seriously considered just turning around and going back the way she came. At least for a little while. To let them all cool off up there. But she ended up deciding against it. Argo really wanted to know what had happened, so she continued climbing the stairs until she reached the top.

There were almost 100 players up there, most of which were decked out in high-tier combat equipment and itching for a rematch. But almost every single one of them was participating in the massive argument. It was just a screen of white noise. Angry white noise. Argo could only pick up an occasional word or two among the wall of sound.

She wasn't about to get any information any time soon. Sighing, Argo turned to face the locked boss door. Why any player would decide to lock themselves inside was also an open question. Boss rooms were pretty much the single most dangerous places you could find in Aincrad. This player, whoever he was, had gone inside anyway. And he'd locked everyone else out.

As far as she could tell, that left him with only 3 options. Because that boss door wasn't opening again until the battle was over. So he'd either die in there, he'd finish off the boss―the rest of the raid group had apparently already done most of the damage and Illfang was nearly dead, so this was not totally unrealistic for an extremely skilled player―or he'd teleport out of the room. Argo still had people watching the teleport gate, though. So if he tried to leave that way, she would be informed immediately.

She'd actually be notified if any of those 3 things happened. The second the fight was over, whether that meant the player was dead, had retreated, or he had killed the boss, the doors would unlock and then they'd be able to go inside. No matter how the situation ended, the doors would open. The fact that they hadn't could only mean that the battle was still in progress and everything was still up in the air.

So she'd have to wait.

Argo ignored the players shouting around her and took a look at the closed, boss door and tried to imagine what was going on inside. This whole incident would without question be a history-forging event to be remembered for years to come. Nobody could have imagined something like this happening.

' _What spectacular events could possibly be going on in there?'_

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

"...You're clingier than a ball of snot," Kirito suddenly announced, breaking the silence.

He hadn't tried taking this particular avenue yet. But since nothing else had worked so far, he gave it a try.

Asuna immediately dropped her jaw. Then she turned back to face him, not sure that she had heard that correctly.

Kirito continued laying out his analogy.

"Remember the last time you were sick with a cold?" he asked. "Like, really sick. Miserably sick. Try and remember the last time that happened. You remember how your sinuses were clogged up and you desperately tried to clear them out with a tissue but it didn't end up working because there was just too much up there? Or even worse, when a bunch came out all at once when you weren't prepared and it soaked your hand? You tried to wipe it all with a tissue but it was too late. Some of it ended up on your hand and in between your fingers. Remember how slimy, clingy, and gross that was and how you had to aggressively wash and scrub your hands afterwards?"

"…"

" _That's_ you."

Asuna was speechless.

"―And that's what I feel like having to deal with you," Kirito continued. "You're clingier than even that. I can't get it off. _You_ are the liquidy snot that lingers between a sick man's fingers that makes him want nothing more than to take a long shower."

Kirito left her with these words to ponder over as he awaited her reply.

Silence filled the air.

...Because Asuna didn't have a reply to this. Not immediately anyway. What could she say? She just gaped at him. Asuna stared at him slack-jawed, in stunned disbelief and with no idea how to respond. She had never imagined that the conversation could have gone in this direction.

"Okay…" she said after several more moments of stunned silence. "That was pretty insulting after all. I take what I said earlier back."

That had been one of the most disgusting mental images she had ever been forced to think about. It made her feel disgusted, humiliated, and angry, especially since the other player had found a way to turn her own words around on her like that.

It made her feel gross and she hated it.

"...When this is all over," Asuna said, "I really want to get to know you when you aren't trying to be a horrible jerk to me at every conceivable opportunity. That was so gross… Real mature, too. Why did you feel the need to share that with me?"

"Because the comparison is apt," Kirito replied immediately, and without shame. "It's a perfect metaphor for what you are and there are many parallels."

"There aren't any!"

"―Speaking of which, I have a new name for you."

"Don't you dare!"

"Oh? I'm pretty daring…"

"That's not something to be proud of!"

"Do you want to hear it or not?"

"No! I don't want to hear whatever disgusting, new name you came up with for me based on that last conversation!"

None of the possibilities that sprang to her mind deserved to see the light of day. Booger, Mucus, Snot… she didn't want him to say any of them.

"My name is Roa―!"

Asuna immediately froze, absolutely _stunned_ that she had made a slip of the tongue as egregious as that one. She simply couldn't believe that it was even possible for something like that to happen in real life. She had read fictional stories in the past where characters sometimes made silly slip-ups like that one and she had always rolled her eyes in disbelief when it happened, thinking that there's no way anyone would ever make a mistake like that for real.

...But here she was. There weren't even any "R's" in her name. So how did one find its way to the tip of her tongue like that? She had no idea how she had managed to make this mistake. One thing was sure, though. Asuna hated that this happened, and she could almost _taste_ the cocky smirk that it had caused to form on the other player's face.

She was _never_ going to hear the end of this and she hated it.

Asuna cringed in despair as she noticed the other player _immediately_ perk up.

"So―" Kirito instantly began.

"Asuna!" Asuna shouted, trying to cut off whatever smart-ass reply she was about to hear. "My name is Asuna!"

She prayed that the other player had somehow not noticed the slip-up. But she knew it was just wishful thinking.

"―As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted..." Kirito trailed off.

He audibly cleared his throat before continuing.

"So you've come to accept your new name after all, Roach," he continued. "It seems you've gotten used to it."

"I have not! It was a slip of the tongue!"

"If by 'a slip of the tongue', you meant 'a moment of honesty', then I would agree with you."

"I did _not_ mean that!"

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

The argument was still going strong. There was a ton of salt in the room. So many of the players there were absolutely seething. Argo was the calmest person in the room by far.

"Oh, hey! Fruit Juice is here!"

Now _nobody_ in the room was calm. If Argo had been in a safe zone, she would have decked the player that said that square in the face immediately. She was actually quite skilled at that. Attacking a player in a safe zone without using enough force to trigger the anti-harassment code.

Out in the wild like this where the code wasn't present, she very nearly succumbed to that urge since she wouldn't have to pull her punches. Getting an orange cursor for a couple of hours wasn't too bad of a punishment. But she did stop herself at the last moment. Instead, her fists clenched and she scowled.

She did not stop herself from _imagining_ the player's violent death, though.

The player who had insulted her then grabbed the guy next to him―his buddy, it would seem―and dragged him over to see her as the other players around them continued the shouting match.

"You see… Fruit Juice knows everything!" the player explained to his friend. "Hey, Fruit Juice! What happened here?"

Holy shit was she mad now.

"Fruit Juice has a name," Argo spoke through gritted teeth.

"No, she doesn't."

Then the player―seeing how angry this remark made her―started to laugh.

Argo snarled, and started to growl. She hated that name so much.

"You should see your face!" the player laughed. "It's just a prank, though! Calm your tits, jeez!"

Argo roundhouse kicked him. Flat out. With no further delay or hesitation. She packed every bit of her avatar's strength behind the action and sent him soaring. She didn't care that it immediately turned her cursor orange. It'd be back to normal by the end of the day. But she refused to allow random pieces of shit like this to walk over her.

This wasn't the first time she had had to do something like this. Argo had been getting, for lack of a better word, _bullied_ recently because of her new moniker and she had not responded well to the treatment. She had kicked several asses already and expected to need to kick several more in the future. There was a long line of assholes begging to get the shit beat of them and the player before her now was right at the front.

If it kept on happening, she was probably going to need to do one of those newly discovered Alignment quests to reset her cursor.

As it turned out, there were actually 3 different types of orange cursors now, not just 2. The 3rd had only been discovered a week or so ago. Orange cursors used to be seen as either permanent or non-permanent but things had been discovered to be more complicated than that.

Players commonly separated them by "versions" now to distinguish between them and avoid confusion. Versions 1, 2, and 3.

First, there's version 1. That's the orange cursor you get for doing minor crimes. It's temporary, and you lose it after some time has passed, but the system remembers that you had it. So if you repeatedly commit minor crimes over and over again, your cursor will eventually become what is now known as 'semi-permanent'. That's the version 2 orange cursor. The one you get from repeated instances of getting version 1.

Originally, it had been believed that this type of permanent orange cursor, version 2, was the same type of cursor as the permanent orange one you got from PKing. But this is not the case. A distinction had been discovered between them, warranting this new, 3rd category.

Version 2 orange cursors could be reset through in-game means. Version 3 orange cursors, on the other hand, the ones acquired from PKing, could not be. They were for keeps. Forever. And they were held by extraordinarily dangerous individuals.

Technically speaking, this "3-orange-cursor-theory" was still not _fully_ proven. There hadn't exactly been any PKers willing to run any tests. They were horrible people, after all. Murderers that everyone, including her, hated.

But there was some indirect evidence for this theory. There were a few known PKers out there, after all. And they all still had their orange cursors clearly visible above their heads the last time any of them had been seen in public. That posed a question. If the version 3 cursor could be reset with an Alignment quest, then why hadn't these PKers done so to blend into the crowd?

They hadn't. None of them had. So it had been inferred that they couldn't.

But version 2 orange cursors could. And as a result, they were starting to get moderately common now, with at least a dozen known instances of players getting them.

Argo herself had almost single-handedly popularized them. She hadn't yet gotten this upgraded, version 2 cursor herself yet―just the version 1 a couple of times―but it was still enough to cause this shift in opinion. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before she got one.

Argo had made a number of... _public_ displays of violence against other players in retribution for being teased. Plenty of spectators had seen what she had done to these people. They had seen her getting bullied and standing up for herself. So plenty of people had become used to the idea that not all orange players were evil right to the core. It was just the PKers that were. Argo had turned herself into a well-known exception in the eyes of the public.

As long as nothing serious was done to the player she attacked, the bystanders would mostly just look at her and laugh it off as Argo being Argo.

It was incredibly convenient.

She had been called a 'silly goose' once. Right after beating the tar out of a well-known―and hated―jerk in the middle of a public street. Her orange cursor had been on full display.

That had been the full extent of the public reprisal.

...She wasn't complaining. Argo took shameless advantage of the changing public opinion.

It sucked when she got the cursor though. Even version 1 was super annoying. She had no idea how anyone could live with a permanent version all the time. It was so annoying and restrictive and she wasn't looking forward to getting version 2. Those wandering NPCs that gave out the Alignment quests showed up unpredictably so she'd have to live with that cursor for a full day or perhaps even longer if she couldn't find one.

In the end, it would be worth it though, in her view. A semi-permanent, version 2 orange cursor was worth the satisfaction of beating the smug arrogance out of pricks like this one.

The player she had attacked collapsed onto the ground.

Argo immediately jumped on top of him and pinned him down to the stone floor. Both of her fists were tightly clutching the collar of his shirt.

"What the fuck?!" the player shouted as he struggled, trying to throw her off. "Get off me!"

But Argo wasn't going anywhere. Using the player's collar to get some leverage, Argo yanked him upwards and absolutely _blasted_ his skull with her forehead in an incredible headbutt that was as strong as a rhino's.

That got him to calm down.

"Motherfucker!" he screamed. Then he turned to his friend. "Dude! Help! Get this crazy bitch off me!"

Argo glared up at the other player that was watching this all unfold.

"Oh? Do you have something you'd like to share with the class, too?" Argo asked, perfectly tranquil.

"...I've never met this man in my life," he lied.

"That's what I thought."

"What the fuck?!" the trapped player shouted. "We've been friends for 15 years!"

"'Friends' is a strong word."

Argo grinned at the byplay before glaring straight into the eyes of the player underneath her. She had no doubt at all that, to him, she probably looked like an absolute psycho. Her bangs were shadowing her eyes, her clothes were dishevelled, and her hair was messily strewn about all over the place.

...But she wasn't one. She wasn't crazy. She was actually a really nice person once you got to know her.

Very friendly and very kind.

"Has anyone ever driven their index finger knuckle-deep into your eye-socket before?" Argo inquired.

The other player paled in unadulterated fear.

"C-can't say that they have," he replied, horrified.

"Let's try it," Argo decided. "For science."

Argo leaned back and sat herself down squarely on the chest of the player below her. Then she made a show of slowly peeling off one of her gloves with her teeth, while her other hand kept the player from moving around too much.

She casually hummed a gentle tune as she did so.

"Haha," the trapped player laughed nervously. "Very funny you two. The joke's been had. You can get off me any time now…"

"Aw~!" Argo cooed. "Don't tell me you're afraid. You should see your face. But it's just a prank bro!"

"Don't you think this is a bit extreme for a―"

Argo interrupted him by ramming her index finger into his right eye socket. She immediately started fishing around with it, digging as deeply as she could. The motion was so sudden, violent, and forceful, that if it had happened in real life, the player's eyeball would have exploded and he would have been killed instantly.

Argo might as well have been deboning a turkey.

Screams filled the air.

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

"So, um… what colour is it?" Asuna asked, trying to redirect the conversation away from the disgusting, previous topic.

Illfang had finally stopped mindlessly launching minions around, and this had caused a blissful silence to descend upon the room that Asuna was extremely grateful for. She no longer had to shout so loudly.

"What are you talking about?" Kirito replied.

"Your hair," she clarified. "What colour is it?"

What he had said earlier―about friends supposedly knowing things like this―had made her really curious about that. She had no idea what he looked like.

"...Well, it sure isn't orange, I'll tell you that much."

"Um… okay? Why are you getting defensive? I never said that it was orange."

"...Only stupid, annoying people have orange hair after all."

"I don't think I'd go that far… but I guess it is an unusual hair colour to have. Why don't you like people with orange hair? That's a weird thing to hate about a person."

It was weird and arbitrary and Asuna couldn't see any logical reason for it.

Kirito didn't answer immediately. He just stared at the girl.

Several moments passed like this before it clicked. When it did, Asuna squawked in outrage.

"My hair is _not_ orange!"

"You have orange hair, Roach," Kirito immediately 'corrected'. "Like a clown."

"I do not! It's not even close to orange! It's chestnut brown!"

"That's not a real colour."

Kirito had no idea if this was true. He was just making shit up to give the girl a hard time.

"But―!"

"―And even if it were true," Kirito interrupted before the girl could defend herself, "have you ever actually seen a chestnut? It's not that colour. Your hair is as close to being chestnut brown as my cloak is to being neon pink."

It was an obvious over-exaggeration and they both knew it.

"Neither of my parents have orange hair! They have brown hair! And so do I! It's just a lighter shade!"

"So light that it's orange."

"It's not orange! If you progressively lighten the colour brown, at no point do you get to orange! It's a fundamentally different thing! Orange is a mix of red and yellow! To get brown you have to mix complementary―"

"Nerd," Kirito said. "Get your eyes checked, Roach. Everyone knows that it's orange. Just accept it."

" _You_ need to get _your_ eyes checked!" Asuna replied. "Are you colourblind?! You don't understand how colours work!"

"...But now that we've agreed that your hair isn't the colour of a chestnut―" Kirito began.

"We did _not_ agree to this!"

"―never has been and that it isn't brown in any way, shape or form―stop lying―there is something I've seen that is that colour. Do you want to know what it is?"

Asuna clenched her fists but did not reply

"The rind of an orange," Kirito revealed.

"…"

"You know... the fruit?"

"I know what an orange is," Asuna asserted.

"I mean… are you sure?" Kirito asked. "Because I don't think you do. If you did, you'd recognize the colour."

"My hair isn't that colour and never has been."

"It is, though. And everybody knows it. Even you. You're just in denial."

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

"Oh my God! What the fuck?! Why is this still happening?! What the fuck?! Somebody help get this crazy bitch off of me, already! I'm gonna die!"

Argo was still on top of the player digging through his eyeball.

"Your HP is fine," the trapped player's buddy reassured, unconcerned.

"I don't give a damn about my HP! It feels weird!"

"What's it like?" a new voice asked.

"I don't fucking know! Like something's swimming around up there! Stop asking questions and help me!"

"It feels like there's a marble in here," Argo suddenly announced as she rammed her finger as deep as it could possibly go inside the player's skull. She wiggled it like an earthworm burrowing through the soil.

She was trying to get her whole fist inside.

"Can you pull it out?" someone asked, curious.

It was a voice that Argo didn't recognize, so she looked up to see who it was.

She was a bit surprised at what she saw.

Argo hadn't noticed until that moment, but she had drawn a bit of a crowd―a larger one than usual. Whenever she usually did things like this, maybe 6 or 7 people would be there to see it at the very most.

Not this time. _Everyone_ was watching her now.

Nobody was shouting at each other in the room anymore. They had fallen silent. The gigantic argument had petered out while she had been distracted. They had all calmed down and had been drawn over by the commotion she was causing. They had formed a wide circle around her as she continued digging through this player's eye socket with her finger.

Everyone was just passively watching―seemingly more curious than concerned.

...Or they were scared. Because there was some of that, too.

It really helped that she was so well-known. Everybody knew her and what she was like, so they didn't care that she was doing this. Not when she wasn't doing any real damage to anybody and was acting so openly. They had seen how she got her brand new orange cursor and it had happened right in front of them. There was no mystery so there was no reason to get concerned.

They had also all done the math, too. Argo was a dangerous person to antagonize―especially lately. With her network of spies, and her ability to just say 'fuck it' and throw caution into the wind, openly assaulting a player for everyone to see, they had determined that anyone making an attempt to stop her would just wind up next in line.

No one intervened. So Argo continued digging and digging away.

None of the bystanders cared enough about the 'victim' to get her to stop.

One of these random spectators―someone that Argo had never met before―had decided to chime in and ask her that last question. Could she pull the marble out? He seemed genuinely curious about what would happen if she tried.

He wanted to see it.

Since Argo was not one to disappoint, she decided to give it a go. There was nothing more incredible than the eyes of a child that had just had his burning question answered, after all. It was Argo's duty to help out with that.

So she leaned forward and adjusted her position slightly to get a bit more leverage before looking the curious player right in the eye and giving him her reply.

"One sec, lemme try."

Then she went deeper.

"No! Don't 'try'! Holy shit, I'm gonna die!"

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

"Your eyes are orange too," Kirito asserted. "It's actually weirding me out."

Kirito was really starting to run out of the things to attack about this girl.

"...Freak," Kirito added, just for good measure.

"Oh, come on! My eyes are an even darker shade of brown than my hair! It's just a dark―"

"...Fiery orange," Kirito interrupted.

"Why do you always start these stupid fights?!" Asuna shouted at the other player. "They never go anywhere!"

"Why do you always ask questions you already know the answer to? You also start more than your fair share of them."

One could even make the argument that she had started all of them simply for refusing to leave.

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

"I think it's fair to say that we're all a bit high-strung here," Argo said.

She had her hands up in a placating gesture as the surrounding group of players stared at her in abject terror.

"Just a bit?!" the player she had jumped cried. "You ripped out my fucking eyeball with your bare hand!"

It turns out you can actually take out a player's eyeballs. Who knew?

Argo did. She had just made the discovery. It would actually do something, too. It would prevent the player from being able to see out of that eye for a while. They'd be temporarily blinded. However, like any other missing limb, it would eventually regenerate.

This came as a shock to everyone that had witnessed it.

"Aw~!" Argo vindictively cooed.

Then she parroted the very same line that had been given to her earlier.

"It was just a prank, though. Calm your tits, jeez! We learned something new!"

"You're a fucking maniac!"

Argo clenched her fists and snarled at the player, more than ready to kick his ass all over again for that remark.

"And you're a fatass with bigger tits than mine!" Argo hollered back. "One less eyeball, too!"

The player was on the larger side for sure. But he wasn't _that_ big.

"Okay, okay, Argo, that's enough, don't you think?" Diabel asked as he stepped beside her, trying to calm her down.

Argo was mad. And Diabel didn't want her even angrier. So he placed what he believed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder to try and get her to relax.

It didn't work. Argo immediately jabbed him in the gut with her bony elbow.

"Don't you touch me!" she shouted. "I am perfectly calm! The calmest fucking person in the whole fucking world! Of all fucking time! Nobody is calmer than me!"

"R-right. Of course you are. My mistake," Diabel replied weakly, hunched over in pain.

Argo pointed at the one-eyed player that she had learned to hate.

"Call me that name again. I dare you."

She hated her new name. Fruit Juice.

"Can we please just start the meeting, already?" Diabel complained.

They had already wasted so much time clawing at each other's throats. They were in a bit of an urgent situation and needed to get a move on. They couldn't just keep fighting like this.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the situation had spiralled well out of his control.

Fed up and wanting revenge, the one-eyed player that Argo had jumped reached into his inventory and pulled out an item.

"Fine!" he shouted as he glared back up at Argo. "You want me to call you that name?!"

He hurled the item at her. The banana bounced off of Argo's forehead and landed a few meters behind her.

She had been too surprised to avoid it.

"Come at me, then, Fruit Juice!"

She did.

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

"Why are you acting so childishly?!" Asuna shouted, at her wits end. "I just want to be friends with you! Why are you turning that into such a monumentally difficult task?! Why does it have to be this way! I don't understand!"

"...What part of ' _I don't want to be your friend'_ have you still not grasped?" Kirito asked in return.

"That is not an acceptable answer!"

Asuna hated when he said that.

" _Why_ don't you want to be my friend?" she emphasized. "What is it about me that is making you act like this? If it's something I can change then I will!"

"And if it's not something you can change?"

"...Then I'll still try!"

"No you won't."

"Yes I will!"

Kirito shook his head.

"You won't."

Asuna narrowed her eyes.

"Name it."

The two of them locked eyes and stared hard at each other for several seconds.

"...Why the hell would you try to change yourself and aspects of your personality for my sake?"

"Because you clearly want me to."

"So what? My opinion should be meaningless to you."

"It isn't. I don't want you to hate me."

"I already hate you. You're not going to change that."

Out of all the comments he had made to her that day, that one hurt the worst. It felt like being knifed in the chest.

"...I-I don't believe you," Asuna said, trying to act like the remark hadn't affected her.

"...Would you like another one-way trip down that staircase? If three times wasn't enough to convince you that I hate you, then maybe you need a fourth. Shall we?"

"That isn't what I was talking about! I get that you hate me _right now_ , I was talking about the other thing you said! How it won't change no matter what I do! _That's_ the part I won't accept! I can change your mind somehow, I just know it!"

"Stop seeking approval from people who don't like you. You'll never get it. No matter what you do in your life, or how much of a saint you are, someone somewhere will find something about you that makes them think you're an absolute bitch. And they'll whine and moan about it forever. There's nothing you can do about that. So you can't just... select people off the street, arbitrarily, to be your friend. They have to want it too."

"I already know all of that!" Asuna replied. "But I didn't just randomly pick you out of nowhere! _You_ picked _me_!"

"I've never been so insulted," Kirito said with feigned disgust. "Why would I ever want some crybaby like you to be my friend?"

This was another hypocritical statement and Kirito knew it. He remembered breaking down once or twice himself already so he was in no position to make fun of others for doing the same. But the statement was given as part of the act he was putting on.

"You can't just show up in someone's life out of nowhere, fix all of their problems for them, convince them to give life one more shot, fill them with hope again that they'll live to see brighter days, make them feel all of these feelings and then walk away!" Asuna ranted.

"Sure I can. That was my exact plan laid out in detail."

It was actually a remarkably accurate summation, in Kirito's view.

"Are you kidding me?! That's a stupid plan! You can't just… do that! You saved my life!"

"So did the doctor that delivered you when your mom was in labor. Do you follow him around like a lost puppy?"

"That's different!"

"How is it different?"

"Do you seriously have to ask that? Isn't it obvious?"

"No."

"Stop trying to rationalize everything!"

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you can't! There are things in this world that don't have an explanation behind them!"

"Oh that's such bullshit, Roach."

Kirito knew exactly where she was going to go with this and wanted to roll his eyes.

"It's true!"

"No it isn't."

"Why do you want to get out of this game?!"

"...What does that have to do with anything?"

"Just answer the question. I promise that it's relevant."

"Fine," Kirito relented. "I want to get out for the same reason as everyone else, I guess."

"Not everyone else wanted to get out, though. I didn't. _You_ made me change my mind. You want to live, right? Why?"

"Getting my brain fried doesn't sound too appealing."

"So… what? That's the extent of it? If the NerveGear killed quickly and painlessly, you'd have jumped off the edge of the world?"

"Of course not."

"Why not?"

"Because I want to live."

" _Why_ do you want to live?" Asuna pressed.

"You want me to explain to you the reason why my life matters to me?"

"Yes!"

"...Why?"

"Because that's akin to what you're trying to ask me to do! That's my point! And that's the thing that you don't seem to understand! Some people just want things. And when pressed, they can't actually give you a rational explanation behind why they do. People fall in love for no explainable reason, they find certain hobbies more enjoyable than others for no explainable reason, and people consciously decide every day that continuing to live their lives is more important than ending it all, once again, for no explainable reason."

"All of those things have explainable reasons behind them, Roach. It's just brain chemistry."

Asuna looked unconvinced, so Kirito decided to elaborate.

"People fall in love with each other because their brains estimate that offspring resulting from their union will inherit good traits. But the brain is just a mass of randomly firing, unintelligible ganglions, and is far from perfect. It fails all the time and that record seeps into the algorithm it uses to find romantic partners turning the whole thing into a mess of spaghetti code. The only reason why it isn't completely understood to the last detail is because neurons are too small for current tech to see how they are all wired together. But that'll change one day."

"As for why people have hobbies and why some are considered more fun than others," Kirito continued, "...I'd actually have to get back to you on that one. Some neurologist probably knows, though."

"...But I do know that last one," he claimed. "Most people decide to continue living their lives because of survivorship bias. You don't hear from or see the people that decided the opposite very often, do you? The only people still around are the ones who value life because everyone else has killed themselves. That means they are over-represented in the population. Those survivors are also our ancestors so that urge is baked into our genetic code―."

"All of those reasons are vacuous," Asuna cut in. "People don't go around their day to day life thinking things like that."

"They don't need to," Kirito replied. "All of that processing happens unconsciously and at the genetic level because evolution in all of its millions of years of experimentation discovered that humans that don't have to think about stuff like that at a conscious level all the time performed, on average, better. So the brain was gradually shaped and selected to be that way through random mutations."

"So _that's_ why you want to get out of the game?" Asuna asked in disbelief. "You tell yourself all of that at the beginning of every new day? Your brain just happens to be wired a certain way so you just do whatever it tells you to? What a miserable way to live your life. You've reduced all of it down to axioms and deductive arguments."

"I haven't reduced anything. It was always that way. There was never anything more to life than that."

"I don't believe you. And I don't believe that if you really thought that way, you'd be trying so hard to escape. You want to know what I think?"

"Not really."

"S-shut up! That was rhetorical! I'm going to tell you what I think either way!"

Annoyed, Asuna continued her rant.

"I think you still want to do something when you get out. Or meet someone again. And I think that's the real reason. You just decided to stir up some garbage so that you can try and force it down my throat like you've been trying to do with all that other crap you've handed me in all our conversations thus far. You disagree with everything I say just because it's me saying it. Even if you secretly agree with me. If someone else were here saying these things then you would have agreed with them without any hesitation."

"Well... you're not wrong," Kirito admitted.

"Admitting it doesn't make me any less angry, you know. It actually makes it worse."

"I'm aware of this."

Asuna clenched her fists, before electing to move on. Those little, side comments of his drove her right up the wall. But she wouldn't get anywhere if she rounded on him for every single one of them, as much as she wanted to do that, so she let that last one slide.

"Is it your family perhaps?" she asked. "You want to see them again?"

It was a reasonable guess in her mind. There were plenty of other alternatives but that one seemed like it'd be the most likely.

"The point I was trying to make is that I think if I pressed you on whatever your real reason is for wanting to live―why you want the thing you're fighting for―you wouldn't be able to explain it to me. You just do. It is what it is because that's who you are."

Kirito didn't reply.

"...And that's who I am," Asuna continued. "That's what _you_ need to understand. I want to be your friend because you saved my life. But there is no reason I can give you for why I want it so much. More than anything else in the world right now. I just do. You matter to me more than anyone else. More than me, even. And I don't know why. Part of me wants to discover that answer myself."

"..."

"So tell me," Asuna said after a few moments of silence. "You never answered. What is it about me that is stopping us from becoming friends? Now that you've gotten your evidence that Illfang is a crazy lunatic after all, I don't see any more reasons why you still need to act like a jerk to me."

Kirito sighed, finally realizing that all of his attempts to annoy the girl into leaving had, and would continue to, fail. In that moment, he decided to finally drop the act completely. It was just a giant waste of time.

"You're in the way," Kirito said, perhaps being honest to the girl for the first time.

"In the way of what?"

"My goal."

"What goal?"

"Why would I ever tell you that?"

"Because then I would be able to help you with it."

"I don't want your help."

"Why not?"

Kirito paused for a few moments to think up a quick analogy.

"...If a 5-year old kid walked into an ICU and asked the surgeons if they needed any help, what do you think they would do?"

"...I see. You don't think I'm strong enough to stand at your side."

"That's part of it, sure. But it's an oversimplification."

"How so?"

"Well… return to that analogy. Suppose that 5-year old in the ICU piped up and started complaining about how the surgeons weren't letting him help because he wasn't strong enough. Would that make sense to you?"

"...Not really," Asuna reluctantly admitted.

"Why not?"

Asuna didn't answer.

"You see?" Kirito asked. "It isn't just about strength, Roach. There's a multitude of other reasons if you try to break it down. The 5-year old doesn't have enough experience to be there. He is distracting the doctors. He's putting the patient's life at risk. The doctors have a solid plan of action in mind already and they would have to waste a bunch of time explaining it in 5-year old terms before the kid would be able to provide any sort of help whatsoever. The return on that investment isn't expected to be any good. And you can keep going. There's a huge list of reasons as to why it's a bad idea. You can extend this analogy as far as you like."

"You can't keep up, Roach," Kirito summarized. "And that's not just because you're not strong enough, though that does play a big factor. There are simply things that can't be done with you there. An experienced solo player on their own can move quickly, silently, and with incredible flexibility. They can change course on a dime. But the moment you add a second player into the equation, the dynamics all change. Compromises have to be made. The two players will argue and discuss what the best course of action is, wasting a bunch of time. The group becomes as slow as the slowest member. Slower, even, because of all the arguments and discussions. And that's why I play solo. Because just as there are things a solo player can't do on his own so too are there things that can only be done by one. They play an important role in the game and that's the path I've chosen for myself. It's also why I want you nowhere near me. You're too clingy. Having you there would bog down my movements too much. And that'd still be true even if you were twice as strong as you are now."

"...That doesn't explain why you won't help us beat this boss, though," Asuna pointed out. "You already proved that you were right about him―that Illfang has this weird attack. You stopped the raid in order to prove it. Why is it that you won't come back with me now to join the upcoming, second raid? Isn't that the best course of action?"

"I already explained that the other players won't be willing to take commands from the player that kicked their collective asses. It's best for me to stand aside as you guys finish what you already started."

Asuna suddenly realized that she wouldn't be able to convince this player with continued appeals to emotion. If she wanted this player to be her friend, then she would have to justify why it's a good idea in a practical way. That seemed to be the only way forward with someone like this. He was too overly logical for his own good.

Asuna sighed, a bit annoyed that she was going to have to break it down like this.

"...But if we were friends, that wouldn't be an issue."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm one of the most well-respected players in that group."

She hated having to sink to this level. It felt like she was at a job interview or something, trying to convince her potential employer why hiring her is a good idea for the company. It made her feel ridiculous. But if it was the only way, then she had no choice.

"You may not have realized it yet," she continued, "but those other players think pretty highly of me now because of that last raid."

She had gotten quite a bit of unexpected attention from everyone during that battle.

"If I say that you're on our side, they'll believe it," she said. "Reluctantly at first, no doubt, but they'll give you a chance. I'm also friends with Argo. And connections like those are powerful and can go a long way in changing public opinion. If we get her on your side as well, then it'll be even easier."

"...It's too big of a risk," Kirito replied.

Asuna's eyes widened.

"Your idea of what's risky and what isn't is seriously messed up," she said. "You're willing to stay in this thing's lair, on your own, and experiment with it's incredibly dangerous, secret attack, but you can't come with me to have a simple conversation with some other players?"

When she put it that way it did sound a bit ridiculous, but Kirito believed that his cursor changed the entire situation. And she wasn't taking that into account. She couldn't. Because she herself didn't know the full extent of his situation.

"...Actually, now that I think about it, why are you still here?" Asuna asked.

"What?"

"You're still here. Why haven't you left the room yet? I can't stop you from doing that, you know. I don't want you to do that, but you easily could. You already got everything you wanted in here right? You proved Illfang's attack was real so why do you still need to be here? As much as you claim to hate me, you seem to be sticking around."

"Don't flatter yourself, Roach. I'm not here because of you. I'm just not done testing yet."

"You aren't done testing? What does that mean? You already proved Illfang's attack was real, didn't you?"

"But I don't understand the specific triggers behind it, what it's range is, or anything about the fact that these minions are apparently telepathic―"

"Wait, slow down, what's this about telepathy?"

"You didn't notice?"

"Notice what?"

"These minions act as part of a hivemind. Remember how right before Illfang started launching that attack how they all turned and immediately jumped toward him? The minions knew what was about to happen. They knew. How did they know? Monsters don't talk. They weren't even looking in Illfang's direction at the time. I want to figure that out."

"That's…. You're completely right. I didn't even notice that."

"That's not the only test I want to run either. There are several, more complicated tests I want to run but that I can't because, well, you know."

"...Because I'm here," Asuna finished.

"Yeah."

"Why does that matter?"

"...Because I can't do some of these tests without you constantly raising objections to my methods," Kirito explained.

"In other words," Asuna cut in with narrowed eyes and a dangerous look, "you want to do something bone-headed and unbelievably risky that I definitely won't like and you don't want to deal with me complaining about it."

"A fair assessment," Kirito agreed. "They aren't _actually_ dangerous tests, though. You'd just think they are because you overreact to everything I do."

"...If I was strong enough to get away with it, I'd smack you. How is it that these plans of yours seem perfectly sensible to you? I don't understand how your mind works. It's like you have no self-preservation instincts."

"Pots and kettles, Roach. You're in no position to say that about someone else. How many times have you thrown your life away just today alone? Five? Six? Your spirit animal is a lemming. Yet another reason why I don't want you anywhere near me."

"...You know, lemmings don't actually jump off cliffs to their deaths in mass suicidal stupors. That was proven to be a hoax back when―"

"Oh my God, Roach. That's not the point, you nerd. Nobody cares. The analogy still works even if it isn't a realistic one. You just can't resist sharing your useless trivia from your books at every opportunity, can you?"

"Me?! You think I'm a nerd?! What about you?! What was that brain chemistry rant you went on not too long ago?! You ranted about evolution, natural selection, and how it all conspired to make life meaningless!"

"I was blowing a hole in your argument, Roach. You said people did things for no explainable reason. That's incorrect. There's always one."

"You took that point too literally! I was just saying that people don't, for example, sit down when they're hungry and convince themselves, logically, why they should go get something to eat. And they don't attempt to deduce what the most optimal food choice is for their current state of mind. They just go get something from the fridge after seeing what's in there. People aren't logical creatures. They're emotional ones. They do what they _feel_ is right. Not what they convince themselves into thinking is right. So, yeah. Sometimes, people do things or want things without being able to provide an explanation for why."

"So you're telling me that you did all of this," Kirito said as he gestured to the surroundings, "because you _felt_ that it was a good idea? You just had a feeling so you tried to derail everything I was planning without any further examination?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Asuna admitted, not really seeing any problem with that. "I care about you. Especially when you aren't acting like an insufferable child in an attempt to annoy me as much as possible. But I know that this isn't what you're actually like so I can easily look past it when you do that. I know that the path you're on isn't going to end well for anyone. Especially not for you. And I care about you too much to let you go down it alone. You need to be stopped for your own good, just like I needed to be stopped two days ago when we met in that dungeon for my own good. I'm here for you now just like you were there for me. I won't let you become a criminal."

"...You can't care _that_ much about someone you met two days ago. That's too quick."

"Sure I can. Because I do."

"You have an ulterior motive," Kirito accused.

"I do not!"

"Fine. Whatever. I'm still not going back with you."

"Did you not hear anything I just said?! I'm not leaving without you!"

"...It's better this way, Roach. The rest of you people need the practice, so you should learn how to organize a boss raid―and deal with a failed one―all on your own. You guys will get stronger in the long run that way and that will save more lives in the end."

"It won't!"

"...What?"

"What you said sounds okay in theory, but you're missing a piece of information. One of your assumptions is wrong!"

"Oh? Which one?"

"Coming back with me―and most importantly, becoming my friend after―will save more lives in the end than if you don't do that, and here's why."

Asuna took a few moments to organize her thoughts before laying them all out on the table. If emotional reasons weren't enough to convince this player, then that was fine with her. She'd lay out a perfectly valid, logical argument that couldn't be argued against.

"Diabel didn't become the leader of this raid group because of his strength," Asuna began. "He got the position because he was a neutral, third party that everybody was willing to temporarily work under."

She nervously looked up at the other player, trying to gauge his reaction, but he might as well have been a wall with all of those damned identity protections he had active.

"...Before he arrived," she continued, "from what I've gathered, all of those players you just fought out there were nothing more than a bunch of rag-tag groups of competing players. There were several party leaders who were all competing with each other to become the overall leader of the raid group and some of those disputes came to blows."

Asuna had actually seen a few of those conflicts in passing. It was pathetic. She didn't understand why people cared so much about who, specifically, was in charge. It shouldn't really matter as long as whoever it was had a general idea of what they were doing, was kind, and was willing to keep an open mind and listen to others. But too many people thought otherwise. So many seemed to think that they, and _only_ they, could lead the players to victory.

They were so precious about it. Duels had been fought over this and she wouldn't be surprised if some people had even been killed. As a result, because of everyone's fragile egos, the only way to proceed was to find someone with incredible strength to serve as the leader or else everyone would constantly undermine them at every turn.

The players _needed_ this orange player to come back with her. He was a perfect solution to the problem. No one would be in a position to dispute him taking control and reorganizing everything by force. Asuna knew that he would probably need to fight a bunch of sore losers beforehand, but she already knew how that would turn out. It was obvious and she was even looking forward to seeing them all being swiftly put in their place.

"There are some serious, unresolved schisms just festering between the players out there," Asuna summarized the issue. "Everyone just agreed to let Diabel lead this first raid because someone needed to do it or else we wouldn't make any progress and because he didn't seem to truly want it. He wasn't the strongest player by any means, but ironically enough, that's why he got the position in the end."

A lot of people did genuinely like the guy, but there was a simmering minority that did not approve of his being in charge and they were kept pacified only with the knowledge that the current state of affairs was temporary. It wouldn't last, though. Not after the raid had failed.

With the unexpected defeat, that minority would get very loud very soon.

" _That's_ what you missed," Asuna emphasized. "Everyone put all their hopes and dreams for the future into this raid―into Diabel. But you dashed them all. You single-handedly destroyed the collective hopes of the players. They were unified―poorly, admittedly―but now they aren't. Diabel isn't going to be in charge anymore when I get back. I guarantee it. He's going to be cast aside and then everything is going to devolve into widespread infighting as various factions try to fill in the power vacuum left behind. It's going to be an utter mess and it isn't going to get resolved any time soon."

The picture she was painting here looked pretty bleak―and she was probably laying it on a little bit too thick―but she did not have high hopes for these people and their ability to organize themselves.

Most were okay. It was just that vocal minority that always ruined everything. Anytime anyone tried to get everyone to work together and get along, they acted _offended_ at the mere suggestion that they should work with the _peons_ around them. But at the same time, rather than showing their disagreement by simply refusing to participate and letting the others continue on without them, they actively tried to derail and burn everything to the ground. If _they_ couldn't be in a position of total domination over the other players, then they didn't want anyone to make any progress at all. Self-righteous jerks with a Messiah-complex, every single one of them.

"By doing what you did―sure you proved that Illfang has this secret ability and that's incredibly valuable information―but it came at the cost of fracturing the rest of the players," Asuna explained. "It will take a long time before anyone will organize another raid like this. If you go through with your plan now and leave us, you will measurably delay the end of the game―possibly by a week or more. We're all going to be stuck in here now for longer than we would have, had you not intervened. And it's debatable whether the number of lives you saved by discovering this secret attack will be offset by everyone spending an extra week in here. That's another week's worth of potentially lethal accidents."

No matter how she looked at it, the easiest way to get out of the game―and thereby, the fastest way―was for this player to take control and to lead them out. And this should have been beyond obvious, too. She couldn't see any possible counter-argument. It was the safest way.

...It was just a side-effect that she would be absolutely elated if he did it and that it would make her the happiest that she had ever been for as long as she could remember.

"...But you can stop all of that from happening," Asuna declared. "All you have to do is come back with me. Take Diabel's place. By doing that, you'd turn this collective defeat into a win. Nobody will dispute the fact that you're the strongest player―you proved it already beyond any doubt. That will put an end to the infighting for good, and everyone will be better off in the end, even you. Because you'll get out faster."

It was in _everyone's_ best interest to do things that way.

" _That's_ the best way forward," she finished.

If everyone just got along, then everything would be okay.

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

"I would rather _fuck_ an _Australian mallard_ than take orders from the likes of you!" one player shouted, his voice being heard clearly over the collective voices of the other players around him.

He became the center of attention immediately.

"...Hear, hear!" another player at the back of the crowd agreed.

The argument started raging again. The players were trying to determine who should be the new leader of the raid group. However, they were completely disorganized and weren't making any progress. One person would shout that he should be leader, then everyone else would shout insults at them. The most recent player to volunteer himself for the role was now being heckled, continuing the cycle.

At no point had anyone actually discussed the need for a new raid leader with Diabel, the current one. Everyone all just basically stopped listening to him and ignored anything he had to say, pretending as if he wasn't even in the room.

"Nobody else is more capable than I am in filling that role!" the player being heckled, defended. "I'm the strongest player in this game!"

"No you're not!" the heckler immediately rebuked. "You'd have gotten your butt kicked just like the rest of us if you had been here when that orange fucking _hamster_ cut through our ranks! It was like a bunch of sea monkeys through a lawnmower! You wouldn't have changed dogshit!"

"It would have been another story if I had been there!" the player being heckled pressed. "As soon as he comes out of that room you'll see! You'll _all_ fucking see!"

Diabel watched as the argument progressed from there, totally despondent. He was sitting on the other side of the room, alone, with his back against the cave wall and with a dull expression on his face.

Nobody listened to him anymore and it had been made clear that that wasn't going to change anytime soon. Now, everyone was fighting amongst themselves to see who would take over his position. But by the looks of it, nobody was going to win that battle.

They had all gone through this routine once before, back before the raid. Since nobody had been able to agree on who should be the leader, Diabel had ended up being placed in charge as a temporary solution. He had been the only candidate that everyone had agreed upon, even if most only did so grudgingly. He had been the greatest, bad choice. But now that he had failed to lead them to victory in the battle, that wasn't true anymore. He was seen as unsuitable.

In all honesty, Diabel didn't really care about being in charge. As long as someone decently competent was in that role, then it didn't matter to him. However, there hadn't been a backup chosen to replace him so there was nobody left now. Nobody could agree on a new leader. So all these players were now rehashing all the reasons why they hated each other, in the least constructive way possible.

Diabel himself had underestimated how much they had needed that win against Illfang. Without it, their former cohesiveness was just nowhere to be found.

Argo picking a fight with that player had been the catalyst. Everything had just rapidly deteriorated from there, spiralling straight into the deepest pile of shit the world had ever known. And there was no going back. Players were shouting at each other, and barely refraining from getting violent. They were throwing insults, and any attempt by the more reasonable players in the room to try and bring everyone back on track had miserably failed. Many of those players, seeing the utter futility in their actions, simply threw their hands up in the air and walked away, leaving all the idiots on their own. All the sensible players had either left the room already or were about to.

Diabel sighed in resignation as he watched yet another batch of these players slink away into the darkness of the labyrinth as the infighting continued. Chaos, divisiveness, and insanity had won the day. Everyone else was going home.

' _How had it all come to this?'_

Everything had just fallen apart. If they had all been working together, then they all, collectively, might have been able to come up with a strategy to capture that unknown orange player still in the boss room, defeat the boss, and advance to the next floor before the day was out. But nothing like that was going to happen anymore. Not today. Diabel could see it in the faces of the other players. With all the infighting, the disagreements, the failed raid, and that unbelievably powerful orange player that nobody knew a single thing about, the situation had been written off as a hopeless one and a widespread state of overwhelming misery had spread. Everyone's morale was shot to hell and they all just basically gave up.

They could have come back from this defeat. They all had the potential. He had seen it during the battle with the boss. But they just couldn't look past their differences.

Diabel made a decision. With the reality of the situation staring him in the face, as half the players descended into insanity and widespread infighting, and as the other half just went home, Diabel gave up too.

"Well... it was fun while it lasted."

Diabel's gaze wandered back over to the argument. Somehow, it had spiralled even further out of control. Many players were now fighting. They were attacking each other with their weapons in what looked like an 'every man for himself' free-for-all. The only saving grace was that it didn't look like anyone was trying to kill each other yet.

He had no idea what to do.

He spotted Argo right in the middle of the crowd, next. At first, he had been filled with hope at the sight―thinking that she would try to settle everyone down and stop the fighting. But this was short lived.

There was no good news to be had today. As soon as he spotted the player that Argo was punching, Diabel groaned. It was that stupid player that had called her that stupid name and Argo hadn't been able to let it go. So they were duking it out. Again. Right in the middle of the crowd.

Diabel realized right in that moment that he might just be the only sane person in the room.

He watched in morbid curiosity as Argo ripped out the second eyeball of that player she was still fighting, then proceeded to put it in her mouth and crush it between her teeth like the _calmest_ fucking psychopath in the world. She left the player completely blind and screaming. Then she spat on the ground next to him and started dusting herself off.

"Someone fucking kill me," Diabel said.

He had done everything he could to keep them together. But there was no saving this. They had lost, and that orange player was going to get away.

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

Kirito spent the next several moments deep in thought.

' _Hang on… is she… right?'_

He mentally went over his reasons for doing all of this once again, trying to double check his work. Asuna had actually presented a pretty good argument there for why he should go back with her.

Kirito didn't reply to her at first, though. Instead, he just took the time to think.

"Is it really worth it?" Asuna asked, interpreting the other player's silence as him being unconvinced. "Think about what we could do if we worked together with all the other players. We'd be so much better off."

Kirito said nothing.

"...Come back with me," Asuna pleaded. "If we can't convince everyone that you're on our side, then you can just leave."

She knew that this player wouldn't be able to agree to anything if he felt trapped in any way, so she gave him this option as a way out.

"...I don't think you'd let me," Kirito replied.

"What?"

"You're the type of person who, when given an inch, will take a mile," he explained. "If I helped you with something, no matter how small, you would never again let me out of your sight."

"While that is completely true beyond any doubt," Asuna reluctantly admitted, "I'd rather you didn't say it out loud. It makes me sound overbearing."

"It doesn't make you sound like anything," Kirito said. "You just are overbearing. Cut out the middleman."

"Shut up, okay! I get it! I'm clingy, but I can't turn that off!" Asuna exclaimed.

After taking a few deep breaths and calming herself down, she continued in a much softer tone.

"Let's make a deal, okay? Just… work with us during the upcoming raid. After that, I promise not to bother you if you try to leave after."

"...Are you really capable of that?" Kirito asked.

"Definitely not," Asuna replied. "So come up with a plan to outsmart me just in case. Make sure I can't stop you if you really want to leave, because I'll probably try."

"That's… remarkably honest of you."

Kirito was genuinely surprised that she had been willing to admit that.

"Yeah, well, if I want to be your friend I'm probably going to need to start from the bottom, right?" Asuna reasoned. "Lying to you will just work against me in the end. I'm really not going to be able to let you go if you try to leave."

"You're going to need to learn how to do that one day," Kirito pointed out. "How to let go."

"I've lived my entire life without knowing how to do that and I'm not about to start now," Asuna replied in a self-deprecating fashion. "Not with you, anyway."

"I don't think that's healthy."

"I never said that it was healthy. It's just how it is, though."

Asuna had attachment issues. She was smart enough to know about them, too. Since all of her 'friends' had been selected for her throughout her life, she found it extremely difficult to let go of people that she herself had selected and was trying to be friends with. This player was literally the first person like that for her. And because of that, Asuna wasn't able to let him walk away from her so easily.

She was more than aware of the multitude of issues she had that she needed to work through, but that was for later. If she let this person get away from her then she truly believed that she'd never see him again. So she had to make the most of her time with him, right now, or else she'd always regret it and wonder what could have been. She didn't have the time to self-analyze or to figure out her personal problems just yet.

* * *

**Outside the boss room**

Argo took a seat next to Diabel and let out a satisfied sigh. She was content, clearly having shown _that_ player his place in the world, once and for all.

"So… how'd it taste?" Diabel asked, too depressed and miserable to talk about anything actually relevant or important.

He had been crushed flat by all the failures and the uncontrolled chaos happening everywhere around him and couldn't even imagine having a productive conversation about strategy with another player at the moment. So he didn't even try.

"...What?" Argo asked, confused.

"I saw you eat that player's eyeball," Diabel specified. "It was actually pretty fucked up that you did that."

"What?" Argo repeated, even more confused. "No I didn't.

"I saw you."

"I mean… I tried to," Argo admitted, "but it disintegrated before I could."

' _Right. And that makes it completely okay,'_ Diabel thought to himself, sarcastically.

"What went through your mind that made you think that was a good idea?" Diabel asked, genuinely curious.

"Oh, it's just virtual particles," Argo explained like it was no big deal and that he was overreacting. "It wasn't going to hurt anyone and everyone there needed to be taught a lesson. That player will have his eyesight back in less than half an hour, too. I've done worse."

' _Can't think of too many things worse than that. What you just did was practically terrorism.'_

"...Right," Diabel replied, deciding to leave the conversation there because of how messed up it was.

"Where did everyone go?" Argo asked.

"They left after you guys started fighting each other," Diabel answered.

"Tch," Argo clicked her tongue. "It's such a shame."

' _Yeah, it is,'_ Diabel inwardly agreed. ' _We might have still had a chance if you guys didn't get violent and scare away all the non-crazies.'_

Argo turned to face Diabel.

"Some people are just crazy," she said, without a hint of irony and as if she, herself, was innocent.

Diabel couldn't believe it.

"…Right. Of course. _Some_ people."

Diabel began to question whether or not Argo was a legit psychopath or if she was just telling a joke. Either way, he decided not to point out her absolute hypocrisy in that statement.

"...So what's your plan now?" Argo asked.

"There isn't one."

"...What?"

"We lost," Diabel said. "I'm going to go home and go to bed, now."

He had such a huge headache and really needed to sleep it off.

"What about the boss?" Argo asked.

"What about him?" Diabel asked in return.

"...You don't want to fight him again?"

Diabel blinked before taking a look around the room.

"Nobody's here," he pointed out, gesturing to their surroundings.

That wasn't entirely true. There were still a dozen or so players left. But there were nowhere near enough to be of any use, especially since those few players that were there, had all separated into smaller groups that had distanced themselves from each other.

"The bulk of the raid party has dispersed," Diabel explained. "It's over. I don't think we'll be fighting this boss again for quite some time."

Things would have to settle down for a couple of days first. Then there would have to be another meeting―probably several―because these players couldn't agree on the colour of the sky, let alone who should be in charge. They had proved to him that no matter how bad things got, they could always get worse.

"...And the orange player?" Argo asked.

Diabel turned to look at her.

"I'll leave him to you, I guess. If you want to try something you'll be on your own. So I'll leave the plan for his capture in your hands, and in the hands of those lunatics over there," Diabel said, gesturing to a small group of players that were angrily pacing in front of the boss door, hoping to dish out some revenge on the player inside that had kicked their asses earlier.

"...And in Asuna's hands," Diabel added. "I imagine she's still in there with him, after all."

"Woah, wait. Asuna's in there?"

"She is," Diabel answered. "We came up with a plan earlier to get her inside the room without the orange player noticing. I've been messaging her ever since but she hasn't responded yet. She's probably got her hands full."

"I didn't think she had it in her," Argo said.

Argo hadn't imagined that Asuna was the type of person to directly intervene in someone else's business like this. She hadn't seemed like the combative type. But yet, here she was, trying to save the day by stopping this orange player.

"So... when do you think we'll have another raid party ready?" Argo asked, changing the subject.

"I have no idea," Diabel replied honestly. "Everyone's so divided. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that we need to capture that orange player. But apart from that, nobody agrees on what we should be focusing on. Some people want to round up all the beta testers and make them surrender all their stuff. Some people want to fight the boss. Others want to focus on that orange player above everything else, and everyone and their mother seems to want to become the overall leader of the front-liners, and won't take 'no' for an answer."

With so many disagreements, there was no way anyone was going to be banding together to form another raid party anytime soon.

"It really sucks doesn't it?" Argo said.

"Yeah," Diabel agreed. "It really does. I didn't think a failure would affect us this much."

He had known it would be bad, but not _this_ bad.

"Are you really going to leave?" Argo asked. "What if the door opens? It can literally open any second now."

Diabel laughed at Argo's implication.

"We can't beat that player with just us," he explained, completely serious.

"He's really that strong?"

"He took out the whole raid group. Granted, we weren't very coordinated at the time and we were taken by surprise, but we won't win with the few players we have left with us. The level disparity between him and us is just too vast. We need to get stronger first. If you had seen him fight, Argo..." Diabel trailed off.

He spent the next few moments thinking, before making his decision.

"Yeah," Diabel confirmed. "Besides, nobody listens to me anymore. If the door opens, we're in no position to do anything. So I guess that means you're on your own. If you have a plan, go for it. But otherwise, I'm heading out."

"Okay. I guess I'll see ya around, then," Argo replied.

"You're staying?"

"Yeah. Someone needs to be here."

"Okay. Good luck, Argo."

The only way Diabel could see them getting out of this crisis was if a charismatic, new, unbelievably strong leader came forward and whipped everyone into shape. If that didn't happen, then he had no idea how they were ever going to come together again and win.

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

An extended period of silence had descended upon the two once more. Asuna was at her wits end. She was barely refraining herself from dropping to her knees and pleading for this player to see reason and go back with her. She just didn't know what to do and was agonizing over her choices.

What else could she say to change his mind? She had tried everything she could think of and none of it had worked. But still, she absolutely refused to give up. There just had to be a way. There had to. She just knew it. But how?

She was going to have to―

"Fine."

Asuna perked up.

The tone of the other player's voice had completely changed. All this time up until now it had had a cold, hostile quality to it. But now it didn't. He sounded... resigned. Accepting. Even a bit warm and caring, too. Like he had finally realized that she was right.

She dared to raise her hopes a little bit.

"You win," Kirito said, sending Asuna's heart soaring. "We'll try it your way."

"You mean that you―!"

Asuna couldn't believe what she was hearing. She was elated and almost wanted to cry. She was _so_ happy.

"Yeah," he confirmed. "I'll lead the next raid."

Kirito stood up and offered the girl his hand. She accepted it, and Kirito pulled her up to her feet.

"We'll do it tonight," Kirito decided. "We'll have another meeting in Tolbana in 2 hours and we'll make another attempt on Illfang this evening."

Asuna's whole countenance lit up like the sun. There were tears in her eyes and she wasted no more time and jumped him―ensnaring him in a crushing embrace.

Kirito awkwardly hugged her back, not really sure how to handle the situation.

"Thank you so much!" Asuna cried. "You won't regret this! I'll make sure of it!"

"We'll just have to see. Asuna."

Asuna's eyes widened, unable to believe that the other player had actually used her real name. Willingly. Without smuggling in any dirty insults or cheap shots. She was pretty sure it was the first time. With that single name, something fundamental about the dynamics between them had changed. She could feel it.

"W-what happened to Roach?" she couldn't help but ask.

"I don't think I'm going to call you that anymore," Kirito admitted. "Friends don't call each other names, right?"

Asuna nodded, smiled and wiped some of the tears out of her eyes. She was an emotional wreck now, but it was on the opposite side of the spectrum from earlier. Instead of depression and misery, it was sheer delight.

"Well don't just stand there, pull out your crystal. We should get a move on if we want to face this boss again," Kirito said.

He pulled out his own teleport crystal and gestured for her to do the same.

"R-right!"

She pulled her own crystal out immediately.

"We're leaving now. But first, open up your map and show it to me."

Asuna did so, and Kirito took a look at it. He pointed out a position on the map just outside the Town of Beginnings.

"You see this place here?"

"Y-yes!"

"Mark it. We'll meet up there in 30 minutes."

"Why so far away?"

"I'm orange, remember? I'm not allowed to stay inside cities for very long. We'll have to meet outside the safezone."

"That is so unfair! You're a good person! You don't deserve that!"

"It is what it is."

"...O-okay! I understand! I'll meet you there in half an hour!"

"Let's go then."

Kirito raised his teleport crystal. Then, before her eyes, Asuna saw him crush it, causing the teleportation animation to play.

"Teleport!" Kirito declared.

Then he vanished from the room.

Asuna found herself alone a moment later. She stood there in awe for almost a full minute. She just couldn't believe it. All of her hard work had finally paid off. Smiling the biggest smile she had in years, she activated her own crystal, vanishing after him.

She had finally gotten through to him!

* * *

**Town of Beginnings**

When Asuna reappeared at the teleport gate in the Town of Beginnings, she took a quick look around to see if she could see the orange player. She knew that he wouldn't be able to stick around for long as he had just explained to her that he needed to leave immediately, but she had been hoping to arrive soon enough to run and catch up with him as he left.

However, she couldn't see him. She had probably waited for too long in the boss room and wouldn't be able to catch up now. So she assumed that he had probably gone invisible before she had gotten there and was on his way now. So she decided to head to their meeting spot immediately. It wasn't very far away and she was pretty sure it'd only take her about 15 minutes to get there, but she wanted to arrive extra early just in case something happened to delay her along the way.

* * *

Asuna could not wipe the smile off her face throughout her journey.

After finally breaking down that person's walls, they were finally on the same side!

If nobody else had been around to see her, she probably would have done a little fist pump. But alas, there were people around and so she wasn't able to express herself openly. They probably already thought she was a little bit weird due to the unbelievably blissful expression that was spread across her face and the tears of joy in her eyes and she didn't want to make it any worse.

There was a noticeable skip in her step all along the way. Her mind was filled with all of the incredible things that she could imagine the two of them doing together as a team in the future. They'd be training together, fighting together, travelling together, and she could finally begin the slow and steady process of getting him to accept the fact that they were friends.

There was still lots and lots of work to do on that front, after all. She had only managed to wring out a single agreement for him to lead the raid. And knowing him, he'd probably try to ditch them all the second it was over if she wasn't there to stop him. So she would have to figure something out. She couldn't get too excited yet, Asuna reminded herself. There were plenty more battles ahead.

She arrived at the designated meeting place almost 20 minutes early. She had been a bit over-eager to get there and had gone a little faster than she had predicted. But that was okay. It was only a 20-minute wait. She walked up to the exact pixel-perfect spot that the other player had pointed to on her map and took a seat.

Then she waited, almost vibrating from anticipation.

* * *

Argo was walking through the woods in the middle of the night with a predatory grin spread across her face.

' _What a fucking miserable day.'_

The front line was in shambles. That orange player was on the loose. The boss was still alive. Nobody was organized and it felt like she was the only person still making an effort. Diabel had just looked _done_ when she had last seen him and it felt like she was on her own.

Argo had managed to organize a new meeting, though. She had leveraged her connections and had scheduled it for tomorrow so that everyone could talk. The only reason that she had been able to get anyone to agree to show up, though, was that she had framed the meeting as one in which they could talk about the orange player and about how he had derailed the previous raid. _Not_ about organizing a new raid against the boss. It seemed that it was still too soon to think about that right now. Argo knew that a meeting like that would just end up as a massive argument and everyone would storm off in the middle of it.

The topic of this meeting wasn't entirely irrelevant, though. It just shouldn't have been the main focus of the players. Everyone should have been focusing on defeating Illfang, in her opinion. The orange player was really important, but he shouldn't have been at the top of the list. Progressing through the game was more important.

In any case, though, since the players wouldn't show up to a meeting about that yet, Argo intended to get the most out of this meeting tomorrow. It wasn't a ploy to get everyone to show up under false pretenses to talk through their issues with each other. She was a girl of her word. The topic had already been set and that's what they were going to talk about.

Argo still had a lot of unanswered questions, after all. So much shit had happened during that failed raid with that orange player and it would take hours to slog through it all. There were dozens of witnesses that she needed to interview, and she probably wasn't going to be able to get through them all in a single meeting. She'd probably need 2 or 3 more meetings after just to finally piece together what had happened and how everything had gone to shit the way it had.

She'd be dealing with the fallout from this one orange player and all the crazy, impossible shit he had pulled for weeks. But as furious as that made her, she had been able to compartmentalize all of it and put it in a box in her mind marked 'to be opened tomorrow'.

Right now, she needed to decompress or she'd hit the roof.

 _Tomorrow's_ Argo would deal with all of that. _Today's_ Argo was currently stalking through the woods in the middle of the night.

She had given herself a cutoff. If the boss room doors hadn't opened by 11 pm, she'd delegate the task of continuing to watch them to her subordinates and she'd go do something else.

Well… it had hit 11 pm and dammit, she had wanted out. She had been so damn bored just staring at the wall for hours and she needed to leave. She had been in a bad mood all evening.

As she had been figuring out what she should do in the meantime though, she had spotted something interesting on her map.

There was no better stress relief.

Asuna had been conspicuously absent for some time now despite the significant role she had played in the recent battle and the vital information she had. She had also been unresponsive to messages. She held a huge component of the picture that Argo was trying to piece together. That meant that Asuna needed to be debriefed and Argo needed to recover her footage from that necklace to learn about what had happened after she had snuck inside the room with that mysterious player.

This was the main excuse she was using to justify meeting up with the girl now. She was gathering important information and it had nothing at all to do with the fact that Argo had literally become addicted to teasing the hell out of that girl and needed to do so regularly to continue functioning in society.

The girl was also alone, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. It was a perfect opportunity.

Argo had no idea why, but Asuna hadn't moved from this random field just outside the Town of Beginnings for quite some time. Because Asuna was marked as a friend and didn't have any significant Hiding abilities, Argo had been able to track her without too much trouble. She had no idea what was going on or what the girl was up to, but Argo was going to 'surprise' her with a sudden visit.

She needed another Asuna fix. The girl was just too entertaining. There was no way that Argo could be asked to leave her alone. She just couldn't. She'd start going through withdrawal if she were deprived like that so cruelly.

Her grin increased in size.

Asuna was just a few dozen meters away now. Once Argo made it through the next set of trees, she'd be able to see her.

' _Come to mama, sweet cheeks.'_

* * *

"Hey, babe? Did you miss me?"

Argo had approached from behind and was now about 10 meters away, staring at Asuna's back with a hooded gaze.

Asuna twitched, startled that someone had snuck up on her. Then she turned her head and the two of them locked eyes.

Argo winced at what she saw and her teasing grin was completely wiped away in an instant.

There were tears in the other girl's eyes and she was looking absolutely miserable. Like a puppy that had been kicked out of the house and abandoned out in the rain. And when they locked eyes, the girl became even more depressed. As if Argo was the absolute last person in the whole world that Asuna wanted to see. This felt, to Argo, like being sucker-punched in the gut.

Argo extended her hand out. She wasn't sure why she did it, but it was some sort of feeble attempt to reach out to the girl.

"Go away, please," Asuna said with a sniffle. "I can't deal with you right now."

Then Asuna looked away.

Argo remained rooted to the spot, speechless. It was another sucker punch. Much worse than the first. And Argo had no idea what to do about it.

This had never happened to her before. Asuna had never outright… rejected her like this. Treating her as if her mere presence was going to ruin her day.

It hurt.

A lot.

Weren't they friends?

Argo didn't know what to do or how to respond to this. But after a moment of contemplation… she recognized something _disgustingly_ familiar about this situation.

Her eyes widened and she gasped the instant she placed it.

The realization was another sucker punch. But this one was right in the _soul_.

' _Have I really been misreading people this badly all this time?'_

It had happened again. This was the second time.

It had started with her friend Kirito. Argo had utterly convinced herself that the reason he had vanished was her fault. It was the only explanation that she could come up with for why he was going to such incredible lengths to avoid her.

Nobody could elude her network of spies for so long without making a deliberate attempt to do so. There was no avoiding the fact that this was exactly what Kirito was doing, wherever he was. He was avoiding her. He probably even hated her. And there was only one explanation as to why that might be.

She had gone too far at some point. Crossed some sort of line. Strained the bounds of their former friendship too much.

Back during the beta, they had been close. Closer than she ever remembered being with anyone. They had met up almost every single day and hung out. She had teased him, and he had complained about it, half-heartedly pushing her away every time. But because his attempts to get her to stop were so feeble, Argo had assumed this to mean that their interactions were still lighthearted and that he didn't care all that much about what she did or how often she teased him.

She had thought that they had been best friends. But at some point, she must have crossed the line without realizing and he had been too hurt to say anything about it. Deciding to just abandon her the instant he could get away with it.

His absence, once she figured out that it was intentional on his part, had practically destroyed her self esteem. She had spent a _lot_ of nights wondering just where she had gone wrong. Kirito had practically been her only friend. So his leaving had cut deep.

...But then she had met Asuna and the cycle had repeated.

Asuna had been such a riot to be around. And she had partially filled the hole in her that Kirito's absence had left behind. Not perfectly, and not completely, but well enough for Argo to smile again.

They had gotten... _decently_ close, and Argo had fallen into the same routine that she had fallen into whenever Kirito was around. Hang out, and tease the hell out of her new friend at every given opportunity. Asuna's efforts to get her to stop had been lighthearted, so Argo had thought that they had both enjoyed the banter.

But with that one, single look that Asuna had just given her a moment ago, the look of ' _we're not friends, and in my most vulnerable moments I don't want you anywhere near me',_ Asuna had blown that hole wide open again and all of Argo's recent, self-esteem issues rushed to the forefront of her mind.

' _It has to all be my fault. There's no other explanation.'_

Argo kept on going too far and was horribly misreading other people's emotions at every turn, unintentionally trampling over their feelings. And that was why this kept happening.

Asuna and Kirito both saw her as nothing more than a nuisance that delighted in their misery. _She_ was the bad guy. And she kept digging her own grave like this every time she tried to make a friend.

Friends were supposed to be there for each other in their most vulnerable moments. But both times, she had been rejected. Kirito had abandoned her―or rather, Argo had abandoned him―and now Asuna wanted her to leave.

It was Argo's fault both times. It had to be.

' _Wow, you are such a fuck up. How could you have let things get this far?'_

Argo winced and her whole demeanour sagged as a cloud of depression and misery sprung up over her.

' _Today really sucks. Just leave before you make things any worse.'_

Argo sighed and turned around without another word, fully intending to comply with the demand. Her former good mood was in utter shambles. She knew that she wouldn't be getting any sleep for a long time.

Argo took a step… but then she froze.

After almost a full minute of dead silence, she spun back around.

' _No,'_ she decided. ' _Not this time. I'm not going to let you pull a Kirito on me.'_

Argo had never been able to tell him how much he actually meant to her and how much she had valued their friendship. As a result, all of the evidence she had provided him had pointed to the fact that it was all superficial when that couldn't have been further from the truth.

The same thing was happening here with Asuna. Argo had never been able to tell her how much she meant, either. And so all the evidence was pointing to the fact that their friendship also wasn't real.

But it _was_ real. And Argo wanted it to be. Argo didn't want this to happen again and she would regret it forever if she left this girl alone like this when she might have had the chance to do something about it. If she walked away now, it would all be over for good.

Argo needed to show this girl that she was more than a nuisance that entertained herself at Asuna's expense. If Argo was still rejected afterward, then fine. But at the very least, she would have made the attempt.

So, instead of leaving, Argo marched over to the other girl and sat down right next to her.

Asuna twitched.

Argo's heart was beating wildly. She was so nervous and so far outside her comfort zone, but she needed to do this. For both of them.

"P-please leave," Asuna almost begged, sounding like she was on the verge of bawling her eyes out.

Argo hesitated for a moment, unsure of herself, but then she sighed. Then she wrapped her arms around the other girl and gave Asuna a big hug.

"I'm not going anywhere this time."

Asuna started to cry.

* * *

Argo felt so unbelievably awkward in this situation. But she forced herself through it.

Hugging people, especially black-haired, mousey people like Kirito, was usually second nature for her. But that was only when the mood was light-hearted. She didn't know how to handle something more serious like this. But she knew that this was the right thing to do when Asuna didn't push her away, so she forced herself to continue until the other girl finally stopped crying a few minutes later.

"A-aren't you going to laugh at me?" Asuna asked, miserable.

She fully expected the info-dealer to do that at any moment. She always did that.

"No."

Argo resolved to herself in that moment that she was a new person, and wouldn't be teasing or laughing at her friends anymore without their permission. Not when it backfired so horribly every single time.

"W-why?"

"Because we're friends, Asuna. And I don't want you to hate me."

Argo winced at how vulnerable she sounded when she admitted that. But she figured that it was probably necessary to convey her actual feelings every once in a while to the people she cared about. Every friendship she had had so far had failed miserably when she hadn't done that, so she wanted to try something new. She was willing to place herself in these awkward, uncomfortable positions if it meant she could stop ruining all of her relationships.

Asuna was astounded. She had no idea that Argo was capable of acting like this. The girl was serious. Argo was just… there. For her. Without teasing her about it.

Nobody had ever done this for her before. Before being trapped in this game, literally nobody cared about her. So this was a new experience. Somebody being there for her in her worst moments was… nice.

Maybe they _were_ friends after all.

"I don't hate you, Argo," Asuna clarified. "I just… I can't handle you sometimes."

Argo gulped, as some of her worst fears were realized.

"Chocolate Ramen," she suddenly declared.

"…W-what?" Asuna asked, baffled.

"Chocolate Ramen," Argo repeated. "That's our new safe word from now on."

"...What are you talking about?"

"In the future, if I'm teasing you about something but you're actually miserable and depressed at the time and can't handle it, and if I haven't noticed this for some godforsaken reason, just say that phrase. Work it into a sentence. Chocolate Ramen. I'll stop immediately."

"W-why?"

"I've… recently been made aware of the fact that I don't think I know how to read people's moods."

"What makes you think that?"

"You did _not_ look happy to see me, Asuna. That look you gave me was like a knife in the heart. I don't want to lose you as a friend."

"S-sorry!" Asuna immediately apologized. "I didn't mean to―"

"It's okay," Argo reassured. "Can we just… start from scratch? I want to know why you're so upset. But I need you to know that Argo has an off switch now. Please say the phrase."

"I don't think we need to go that far―"

Argo suddenly reached up with one of her fingers and placed it over Asuna's lips, shushing her.

"Please say it once? For me?"

"O-okay," Asuna reluctantly agreed.

Argo said nothing as she waited for Asuna to say the password.

"...C-Chocolate Ramen?" Asuna tried, unsure of herself and feeling a bit silly.

"Yeah," Argo replied. "Chocolate Ramen."

"Chocolate Ramen," Asuna repeated once more. "Why Chocolate Ramen? That sounds gross."

"It's actually a thing. Look it up. Anyway, it's a food that most people tend to not know or care about. And it's something you're unlikely to say in any real-world situation. So it's our password now. Since there's no context in which you'd use it normally."

"O-okay...?"

"Basically, I want you to keep me in check so that I don't ever cross a line with you. If you think I'm about to go too far, say that phrase. Then I'll apologize before I destroy our friendship with my big mouth."

That, if it worked, would prevent what had happened with Kirito from ever happening again with Asuna. Argo was kicking herself for having never thought about doing something like this before.

"Oh, Argo... I didn't know you were so worried about that. I'm touched."

Asuna had no idea what to say. That might have been the most considerate thing that anyone had ever said to her. She couldn't believe that Argo was capable of that.

"N-now can you p-please tell me why you're so sad?" Argo stuttered, unused to being such a touchy-feely wuss. "Is it because of me?"

She really hoped that it wasn't. But she _needed_ to know.

"No, Argo," Asuna assured. "It isn't your fault. B-but it's a long story…"

"I've got all night," Argo pointed out. "And I want to know."

"You… aren't going to make fun of me?" Asuna asked one more time, just to make sure.

If this all turned out to be some long-winded, elaborate attempt at teasing her, it'd probably be enough to break her completely. The day had not been kind to her. Pretty much every last nerve she had, had been frayed. Asuna was hanging by a thread and had been for a while.

"Say the magic phrase," Argo said.

"You mean…"

"Yes."

"C-Chocolate Ramen."

It still sounded so silly to her.

"Well, Asuna, I'm not going to make fun of you now," Argo promised.

Maybe she would later when she had Asuna's implicit permission to continue.

"O-okay…"

* * *

It was an absolute treasure trove of information.

It turned out, the reason why Asuna was so upset revealed a ton of extremely valuable information that Argo had not expected to hear. It took almost everything she had to suppress the part of her that was demanding to do a full interrogation of the girl.

Hidden boss attacks, weird, glitchy behaviour, the fundamental reason why the orange player had stopped the raid… _so_ much shit had been revealed in Asuna's explanation. But Argo forced herself to just shut her trap and listen. She could drag Asuna to the meeting tomorrow where they could discuss at length everything that had happened.

"―I was so sure that he was going to come!" Asuna ranted. "He promised me right to my face! And then he just… didn't show up! I practically laid my heart bare for him and he just brushed it aside!"

Asuna had worked herself up again and she quickly found herself both pissed and sad. A very common emotion she experienced whenever that orange player came up in conversation.

"How long have you been waiting out here for him?" Argo asked.

"I-I don't know. It's been a little while, though."

' _About five hours, if I've understood the timeline of her story correctly. Not sure I'd qualify that as just "a little while"…'_ Argo thought.

"Wow, what a jerk!" Argo exclaimed. "He totally stood you up!"

Asuna sighed, depressed.

"I don't even know where he is right now…" she whined.

"I do," Argo revealed.

"You do?" Asuna asked, shocked. "How?"

"He's still inside the boss room," Argo answered.

Asuna blinked.

"W-what?"

"The door was locked, right?" Argo asked. "The boss door. It was locked with both of you still inside. That means that no new player can enter until after the fight is over. However, that door still hasn't opened yet. It's still locked. So…"

Asuna's eyes widened.

"So, you mean, he's still in there?!" Asuna shouted in disbelief. "How?! I saw him teleport out! I even made sure that he left before me so that he couldn't pull something like this!"

"Oh, look at you! Such a clever girl!" Argo cooed. "That was good thinking but I think he figured out a way to outsmart you somehow. Luckily, though, Argo is a pretty clever girl herself. And so we can find out how he did it."

"H-how?"

"Remember that necklace I gave you?"

Asuna's expression immediately dulled. She had not been 'given' the necklace at all. That was not the correct word to use.

"You mean the one you _blackmailed_ me into carrying?" she reminded the other girl.

"'Blackmail' is such a strong word," Argo pointed out.

"It is," Asuna agreed. "It's also very appropriate in this context."

That, by definition, is what happened.

"...You know I wasn't really going to share those pictures, right?" Argo asked.

The whole situation had been a seat-of-the pants idea improvised on the spot that Argo almost certainly wouldn't ever do again. Not after their little heart-to-heart a few minutes ago.

"If those pictures ever got out, my life would be destroyed," Asuna said with a straight face. "I'd never be able to look myself in the mirror ever again."

She was completely serious.

"Are you kidding me?!" Argo shouted, incredulous. "You'd become the most popular player in the whole game overnight if they went public! But I'd never do that!"

"Why not?" Asuna asked. "Are you going to tell me you aren't heartless enough?"

That'd be the joke of the century.

"Of course not!" Argo denied. "Don't put words in my mouth! It's because those pictures are _mine_ and mine alone! Why would I let anyone else get their dirty, filthy, grubby little hands on them?"

"That… still doesn't change the fact that I want you to delete them all," Asuna maintained.

"Asuna… you are the hottest maid I've ever seen," Argo declared. "I'll personally slaughter anyone that sees a copy of those pictures. Nobody else is allowed. Only me. You have my word."

Argo definitely wouldn't release them. She had never intended to. If Asuna had called her bluff then that would have been the end of it.

"You took them without my knowledge!" Asuna exclaimed.

"You were wearing a maid outfit!" Argo fired back. "Nobody would have passed up on that opportunity!"

"A maid outfit that you _forced_ me to wear!"

"I did no such thing!" Argo defended. "Wasn't it you who was moping about, complaining about how you had to repay me after what happened?"

That outfit was expensive, too. It had to be custom made.

The whole situation had been ridiculous. There had been a rumour going around about a cave you could go to, to log out. It was an obvious lie meant to mislead and kill a bunch of people and Argo was still trying to track down the asshole that had originally spread the misinformation. Many players had fallen for it. Asuna had nearly been one of them, too, but Argo had arrived just in time to save the day.

Asuna's unbelievable sense of honour had then made an unfortunate appearance and she had insisted on somehow repaying Argo for saving her life.

Argo had told Asuna straight up that she was going to make the girl wear silly outfits mostly in an attempt to get the girl to go away. They hadn't known each other at the time and Argo hadn't wanted to be 'repaid'. But Asuna had insisted. And she had agreed to Argo's crazy demand instead, reluctantly but unwaveringly, completely missing the fact that Argo hadn't been serious.

Argo had expected Asuna to tell her to go fuck herself, flip her off, and then walk away. The girl's unexpected agreement had genuinely caught her off-guard.

However, Argo couldn't just say she didn't mean it afterward… that'd make her feel like a coward. And she had a reputation to maintain!

So she made it happen. It had taken several days to set up, but they had agreed on a time and Asuna had actually shown up. And Argo was glad that she had because they never would have become friends otherwise.

"I _wasn't_ moping!" Asuna shouted, aghast. "It was only fair! You saved my life by stopping me from going inside that stupid logout cave, so of course I owed you a favour in return!"

"Then why are you surprised that I accepted your offer?" Argo asked.

"I didn't think you'd make me wear something humiliating like that in exchange! No normal person would have requested that! And you didn't say anything about pictures!"

"What a load of bull! You agreed to do anything I wanted you to for three hours. That was the deal."

"― _Not_ anything! Anything _within reason_!" Asuna emphasized.

"Taking a picture of you in a public place wasn't within reason?" Argo asked, confused. "Do you see the problem here? That agreement of ours was vague at best, and you never objected to it or tried to narrow the scope of what was allowed and what wasn't. You instead agreed instantly without reading the fine print. So, serving me hand and foot and treating me as your queen for every single second of all three of those glorious hours was well within the terms!"

It had honestly been the most amazing thing that Argo had ever seen. It had made her whole week.

"We had an agreement, Argo," Asuna grumbled. "We settled that agreement and I paid off my debt. It's weird and extremely insulting that my life is apparently worth exactly 3 hours of me gallivanting around in a maid outfit for you, but a deal is a deal."

As it had been the only thing that Argo had asked for, it implied that it was considered of roughly equivalent value to the service that Argo had given to Asuna―literally saving her life. Asuna had not missed this detail and it was a source of great frustration.

"Then we made a new deal after you blackmailed me," Asuna continued her summary of events. "I would carry your stupid necklace around during the raid and in exchange, you would delete those pictures and any copies of them you may or may not have hidden away. So please delete them. Right now. I want to personally witness you do it."

There wasn't much that Argo could say to refute any of that. It was all true, after all.

Sighing, Argo pulled out the recording crystal. She tapped on it and opened up the first picture. A single tear fell from her eye and it rolled down her cheek as her finger hovered over the delete button.

"I hate that picture so much," Asuna said as she looked over Argo's shoulder at the image. "It's time to get rid of it."

"This is the single most riveting picture ever taken in the entire history of the human race," Argo replied. "Nobody has ever or will ever take a better one."

"Delete it."

Argo tried to will her finger to go down and hit the delete button, but it wouldn't budge.

Asuna raised an eyebrow.

"I'm waiting."

Argo tried again. And failed.

"I… I can't do it," Argo admitted.

"Why not?" Asuna asked dangerously.

"I'd be sent to The Hague," Argo explained.

"The what?"

"―For crimes against humanity."

"Stop being so overly dramatic," Asuna muttered. "Just hand it over then and I'll do it."

Asuna reached out to try and grab the crystal right out of Argo's hand, but Argo moved her hand away.

Asuna narrowed her eyes.

"We had an agreement, Argo," Asuna pressed. " I held up my end, so it's time to hold up yours."

"But… I can't."

"Chocolate Ramen."

Argo's jaw dropped.

"N-no fair!" she cried foul.

Argo hadn't expected that phrase to be used against her so swiftly and with such functional power!

"Chocolate Ramen, Argo!" Asuna repeated. "Hand it over!"

Asuna lunged, attempting to snatch the crystal, but Argo was the slightest bit quicker and avoided her hand at the last moment.

"Fuck!" Argo shouted as she leaped away, creating some distance between the two of them. "H-hold on a sec! Let me prepare myself first! I need some more time to think!"

Argo knew that she couldn't go back on her word. Chocolate Ramen was a phrase designed to end all transgressions on the spot.

...But the pictures.

It was a terrible dilemma. She needed time to sort it out!

Asuna narrowed her eyes and glared at the whisker-faced girl.

"Argo…" Asuna trailed off menacingly.

"I've got it!" Argo suddenly announced. "I'm proposing another deal!"

It was the only way out of this that she could see.

"Oh? What deal?" Asuna asked, skeptical, but a little curious too.

"I'll promise to never ever allow another soul to see these pictures," Argo outlined. "Ever. It'll remain our secret forever until you permit me to share them."

Argo could even rig up a deadman's switch if she needed. Where all the contents of the crystal would be erased periodically unless she personally intervened to stop it. That way if she ever lost the crystal or died while she was carrying it, she could still be certain that everything would be erased. That was possible to do.

"Why would I ever give you permission to do that?" Asuna asked.

"Y-you never know!" Argo replied, not having a stronger answer than that.

"Okay… what else?" Asuna pressed. "That's not good enough."

It wasn't even close to good enough.

"...I'll also agree to the same thing I made you do earlier," Argo proposed with a wince. "Three hours… whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. Within reason, and excluding making me delete these pictures."

Argo _really_ didn't want to get rid of them and was willing to do almost anything to stop it. Argo was really hoping that Asuna would be interested in a little bit of revenge and would take the bait.

"I'd be willing to consider this…" Asuna agreed with a smug grin.

It actually did sound promising. If she could get blackmail material of her own on Argo, then she could be sure that those pictures would never see the light of day. Even if they didn't end up getting deleted.

"Of course," Asuna continued, "you know I'll make you wear humiliating outfits too right? And I'll take plenty of pictures. I might even just share them."

Asuna knew that she almost certainly _wouldn't_ do that, even if Argo released those pictures of her first. But Argo didn't know that. Asuna didn't think that Argo would call her bluff, either.

Argo sighed, but nodded.

"Go ahead. I agree."

Those pictures were worth it.

"W-wait, really?" Asuna asked, a bit taken aback. "You don't care if I take humiliating photos of you and spread them around?"

"As long as I'm not naked in them, sure," Argo said. "My reputation has already pretty much been ruined in that respect anyway. So I'm willing to take another hit for the team if it means preserving these historical artworks."

The pictures of Asuna really were something else.

"W-what do you mean your reputation is ruined?" Asuna asked, worried.

"You mean… you don't know?" Argo asked, a bit hopeful that the other girl wasn't aware of the situation.

"...Are you talking about the fruit stand?" Asuna tried.

Argo's eyes became dull.

"Yes, Asuna. I'm talking about the fruit stand."

Was there anybody in this game that _didn't_ know about that?

"That's not even that bad, Argo," Asuna reassured. "At least nobody was recording or taking pictures at the time."

Argo clenched her fists.

Asuna was _so_ wrong about that.

"Some asshole was fucking bird-watching at the time," Argo revealed with a snarl.

"W-what?"

"Some _random asshole_ was aimlessly pointing his camera around at random birds and shit in the area, and as a total fluke, he turned at the exact, incriminating moment when it all transpired and caught the whole incident from start to finish on film, in flawless, crystal clear, totally-centred HD perfection. Complete with audio. It's _everywhere_ now. The video. Nobody calls me The Rat anymore."

The video itself was almost comically well made. It couldn't have been better put together if it had been staged.

Asuna was speechless.

"...So, I've got nothing more to lose," Argo concluded.

"I-I'm sorry," Asuna apologized.

She meant it, too. Asuna knew exactly what it was like to be constantly called names that you hated, so she sympathized.

"I didn't know," Asuna admitted. "But it's just a picture of me in a maid outfit, Argo. You don't have to go this far. Just get rid of it."

"You're blinded, my child," Argo immediately replied.

"W-what?"

"You're a freak."

"A-Argo!"

Asuna was actually a bit sensitive to that word since it was the same one that that orange player had used on her. It actually hurt her a little bit to be called that. Especially by a friend like Argo.

"A freak of nature," Argo clarified. "A deviant. A distortion of the natural order. And yet you haven't realized it yet. One day, you'll see."

"W-what are you talking about?"

Asuna was starting to feel self-conscious again.

"Nobody I've ever seen in my life is as hot as you are," Argo admitted. "Not even supermodels. You're that rare breed of woman that's just a perfect, all around, natural 10."

Asuna immediately blushed and looked away, not sure how to respond to such extreme, direct praise. Especially when she didn't even agree with it.

"You're a freak," Argo doubled down. "You won every single genetic lottery when you were born. You robbed _thousands_ of girls all throughout the world of the natural beauty they should have had when they were born and you hoarded it all away for yourself like a dirty little thief. I'm so jealous about that, by the way. It isn't fair!"

Asuna remained rooted to the spot, embarrassed, mortified, and completely unsure of how to react.

"But these pictures… they go beyond words!" Argo continued her rant. "They're national treasures! You can't expect me to get rid of them so easily!"

Asuna gulped after witnessing the intensity of Argo's burning gaze. Argo had declared this as if it were a fundamental truth of the world. She was grinning at her like a wolf.

"Besides… I'm sure you'll want to have something like this in your back pocket in the future. It'll be one hell of a trump card," Argo finished.

"...W-what do you mean?" Asuna hesitantly asked.

"You know… for when you finally decide to confess your feelings to that guy."

Asuna's jaw dropped and her whole face went red.

Argo continued, speaking as if she were giving a weather report and that this was no big deal.

"Just slip him this picture and you'll have him wrapped around your finger immediately," Argo suggested. "You won't even have to say anything. No words will need to be had. One moment you'll be standing in front of him, shyly handing him that picture, and then the next moment you'll be rolling around in the dirt with your tongue in his mouth. You'll be able to jump straight to first base on the spot. Maybe even second if you're lucky and catch him on a good day."

"W-what are you t-talking about?!" Asuna shouted, flabbergasted. "You're such a pervert! Nothing like that would ever happen!"

"It's romantic!" Argo exclaimed.

"No!" Asuna immediately denied. "No it's not, Argo! It's sleazy! You have no idea how romance works! And you constantly prove as much! What you just described is obscene, gross and not at all how human relationships begin in reality!"

"But you totally wish it would happen that way. It's so much simpler and more efficient and it cuts out all the unnecessary steps to get to the same destination that everyone knows you'll end up at anyway. So don't even try to deny it. Argo knows all and I can smell it wafting through the air."

"I-I don't! I don't have any feelings for him! I don't even know his name! Or what he looks like! Nothing like that is ever going to happen! It's…"

"It's what?" Argo asked when Asuna fell silent.

"...Impure!" Asuna finished, not able to come up with a better word to describe it. So she just settled for that one because it was close enough and conveyed the right idea.

"Oh, you pure, innocent maiden, you. You're just adorable!"

This is the exact sort of stuff that kept Argo coming back for more! Asuna's reactions were just priceless!

"It's true!" Asuna maintained. "I've only known him for two days! Nobody falls in love that fast!"

Argo wrapped her arm around Asuna's shoulder, putting her in a half-hearted headlock.

"You mean to tell me that you've been waiting out here for 5 hours for a guy you _don't_ have a crush on? Even after he stood you up you were still _begging_ me to take his side! And you were so distraught!"

"Because he isn't our enemy! He only stopped the raid to uncover that weird attack! So he shouldn't be treated like a criminal!"

"And you rush to his defence at every turn. Are you sure you don't have a crush?"

Argo poked Asuna in the stomach.

"Your innocent, maiden heart isn't beating wildly out of control at the mere mention of him?"

"It isn't, Argo…"

"Okay, okay. Fair enough. So you don't have a crush on him."

Asuna sighed in relief, hoping that the conversation would drift in another, more reasonable direction now.

"But, I mean, hypothetically," Argo continued, "if you actually did have a crush and were just secretly trying to hide it from me―"

"Come on, Argo! Let it go already!"

"Oh, yeah. Because I'm real good at that."

She wasn't, and they both knew it. Argo did not know how to let go of things like this. The more someone tried to change a subject like this, the tighter she'd clamp her jaws down upon it.

Asuna pouted.

"Anyway, I hope you know that he's going to be a real lady killer in the future. So you should make your move as quick as you can so you can stake your claim. You know. Hypothetically. Strong enough to defeat an entire raid group on his own? A mysterious, rugged criminal that doesn't take orders from anyone? A bad boy loner that just has to be saved? Right, Asuna? That's right down the checklist! The exact sort of stuff that gets the ladies goin', if you catch my drift."

"No, Argo! I don't 'catch your drift'! I don't have a crush!"

"Uh-huh."

Argo did not look even slightly convinced.

"I just…" Asuna trailed off.

"Here it is," Argo replied, seemingly preparing herself to hear a bombshell confession.

"Just…"

"Just… what?" Argo pressed.

She was at the edge of her seat, and right in Asuna's face. They were almost inches apart.

Asuna sighed.

"...No matter what I say, you'll just twist it into something I don't want it to be."

Asuna had planned on denying it further, but what good would it do? Argo wouldn't believe anything she said.

"I mean... naturally," Argo agreed.

That's exactly what she'd do.

"...Unless you say the phrase, of course," Argo amended.

"What? Chocolate Ramen?"

"I'll never make fun of you or your feelings if you say that," Argo promised once again. "Never forget! I might even just help you out. Do a little digging on your behalf? Maybe find out who he is or where he goes?"

She fully intended on doing that anyway. But Argo would be willing to provide Asuna with that sort of information as partial repayment for humiliating and blackmailing her if she happened to be interested.

"C-can you actually do that?" Asuna asked, curious.

She really needed to find that player again.

"Ooh~! Interested are we? Well then allow me to elaborate! There's only one person who has ever successfully eluded me! But he's a crazy exception that doesn't count. And I'm sure I'll find him one day, anyway."

One day, she'd figure out how to make amends with him. She had to find that jerk first, though.

"...So I'm sure I can find something on this new stud," Argo finished.

"I would be… grateful if you could."

"So, anyway, we kind of got sidetracked," Argo pointed out.

That was perhaps an understatement. It was almost to the point that she couldn't even remember the original topic and why she was there in the first place.

"About our deal earlier… Do we have an agreement?" Argo asked.

"You don't delete those pictures of me and in exchange, you do anything I tell you to for 3 hours?" Asuna summarized.

"...Except for deleting the videos and photos," Argo pointed out.

"That sounds… wait, you have videos?" Asuna cut herself off upon hearing that word in Argo's previous sentence.

"...I don't have videos," Argo said with a straight face.

"You have videos," Asuna accused with narrowed eyes.

"...I have videos," Argo relented.

"Delete them!" Asuna shouted. "Those aren't part of the agreement!"

"Videos are just lots of photos laid back-to-back!" Argo justified. "They count! Think of them as really quick slideshow presentations!"

Asuna had half a mind to argue that point, because it was ridiculous, but she figured that it wouldn't end up leading anywhere. Argo was too slippery to pin down in an argument. Instead, Asuna simply took the idea for herself.

"Fine!" Asuna exclaimed. "If that's how it is, then I'll be taking plenty of ' _really quick slideshow presentations'_ of you during those 3 hours!"

"The deal allows for anything within reason," Argo said, trying to get ahead of the possibility of being ordered to do anything too humiliating. "I'm not going to kill anyone for you or give a strip show in public."

"That goes without saying," Asuna replied, rolling her eyes.

"Does it?" Argo asked. "Because that was the first thing I was going to try and make you do back when we made our last deal."

"W-what?!"

"Not the killing," Argo quickly clarified. "The strip show."

"That's only a _tiny_ bit better!" Asuna objected.

"―And not in public," Argo further explained. "For me only. A private show for my viewing pleasure. But I knew you'd reject the idea immediately and start coming up with all sorts of troublesome conditions and rules on what was allowed and what wasn't as a result as soon as you heard my demands. And we couldn't have that. It might have shut down my plans to get you into a maid outfit. So I had to carefully choose my battles. If I picked anything too humiliating then it would have all fallen apart. It had to all be carefully calculated, you see."

"...Why are we friends again?"

"Aw~! Don't be like that, babe. You're going to break my heart! I'm only teasing."

"I thought you said you weren't going to do that anymore…"

"It's… really hard to stop. You're going to have to hit that off button a lot in the future to remind me. Never forget about it, please. Chocolate Ramen. Going cold turkey is hard."

Argo hadn't even made it 5 minutes.

"It's okay, Argo," Asuna felt the need to say. "I know that it's just part of your personality. A-and I don't mind when you act like this when no one else is around. Just… please temper it in public a little bit?"

It would make her feel like a hypocrite if she kicked up too much of a fuss about that. The orange player had been making a huge deal about her own personality and why it bothered him, so if she tried the same thing with Argo it'd feel like she had lowered herself to that same, juvenile level. It was just words, she reminded herself.

"Of course!" Argo immediately agreed. "So… back to that agreement. Yes, or no?"

"O-okay," Asuna accepted.

"Excellent. If you ever want copies of them, hit me up. I've got you."

"I don't want copies, Argo!"

She never wanted to see those pictures ever again!

"Not yet, sure. But if you ever change your mind… the offer doesn't expire."

Asuna rolled her eyes.

Now that she thought about it, it wasn't actually that big of a deal that Argo had these pictures. Asuna was pretty sure she could trust the girl with them. And she didn't actually hate them _that_ much. Argo had… _somewhat_ persuaded her that they didn't look as bad as she had originally thought they did.

"Anyway, back to the real topic at hand! We went really far off track! Long before we got distracted and went on this life-changing escapade through the majestic forest of your love life―"

"M-majestic forest?" Asuna interrupted with a raised brow.

"Eh. It's more interesting than mine. Mine's a dumpster fire."

"Y-you have a love life?" Asuna couldn't help but ask.

"...Maybe."

Asuna could admit that she was a little bit curious now.

"...But I hardly think it's any of your business," Argo replied, her voice grave. "These things are deeply personal, you see. It would be rude for you to pry too much."

Asuna dropped her jaw. She had so many objections to that explanation that she didn't even know where to begin!

"B-but…! Y-you just…! W-with mine…!"

Argo had thrown herself right into the middle of Asuna's own supposed love life head first and without hesitation! And now that Asuna was considering doing the same thing, to a _much_ smaller degree she would add, it was considered too personal?! That was completely unfair and hypocritical!

Argo started howling with laughter.

Asuna blushed and started pouting again, realizing that she'd been had.

Argo eventually settled down and gave Asuna another hug.

"I'm sorry! But your reactions are just priceless! You make it too easy! I can't… not!"

"A-am I really that easy of a target?"

"You are! You've got to learn how to let these remarks just roll off of you. This can't be the first time anyone has teased you, right? With your looks, so many girls must have hated your guts back when you were in school, right? And jealous girls can be vicious little cretins!"

"Well…"

Asuna thought back to her school-life and quickly remembered several such instances in which that had happened. She had been on the other side of jealous glares a lot.

"That just comes with the package of being so beautiful, I guess. There are pros and cons."

"I-I'm not that beautiful…"

"Modest, too,"Argo added. "One day, you'll see. You just need to get a little more confidence. Once we get you a bit more comfortable in your own skin, the whole world will be begging to kiss your feet. Just you watch. I'd love to help you get there."

"Why?"

"Because you're my friend, Asuna. Does there need to be another reason? Despite how much of a hard time I give you, you mean a lot to me. So many people just want to use me for the information that I sell that it's hard to find genuine friendships. We are friends, right?"

"Of course!" Asuna immediately agreed.

They were _definitely_ friends now. There was no question anymore. Now that it had been clarified that Argo's teasing wasn't malicious and that Asuna now had the power to stop it at any time, and that Argo herself genuinely cared about her, any doubt Asuna may have had before was gone. It also helped that Asuna knew that her parents would absolutely hate that she was befriending this whisker-faced girl. They would not approve of this friendship whatsoever.

"Then there doesn't need to be another reason," Argo concluded. "You're my friend and I just want what's best for you. You have so much potential and I'm just trying to needle you a bit to get you to poke your head out of your shell and show some of it off."

Argo started shadowboxing to emphasize her next point a little more clearly.

"Once you can give as good as you get and I can be sure that you can stand up for yourself, even when I'm not around, then my work will be complete!"

"Is that really why…?"

"It's why I don't want to stop teasing you completely, yeah. You're going to meet assholes all throughout your life. Like… a ton of them. An absurd number due to your appearance. And I don't want my friends to be pushed around. So consider it extra training. Just like those spars we've been doing. But these ones are mental. Think about it! If you can handle me you can handle anyone!"

"I guess that's true…" Asuna trailed off, partially seeing Argo's point. "But, speaking of those spars, do you think we could keep doing those? I need to get stronger if I ever want to face that person again."

Asuna was going to need to get a _lot_ stronger. She needed to get to that orange player's level. If she couldn't, she'd never be able to convince him that she could become a valuable ally of his.

"Of course!" Argo agreed, more than happy to help her new friend improve.

"T-thanks."

The two of them had been training together over the past 2 days. They had known each other for about two weeks, but they hadn't been very close until only recently. Argo had saved Asuna's life, then they had made an arrangement for Asuna to 'repay' her for her services the following week.

Asuna hadn't been all that enthusiastic about it and frankly, some part of her hadn't even thought that she'd survive until then. She had still been in a pretty wretched state of mind. But then her life had been saved once again by that orange player and she had felt hopeful for the first time since the start of the game. After that, she had 'repaid' Argo, and then they had started training together and became friends.

"Anyway, I was telling you about that necklace and why I gave it to you," Argo said.

"You never did explain that back then…" Asuna trailed off.

"...Mind giving it back first?"

If Argo told Asuna what was on it before it was handed back to her, then Asuna might very well destroy the item and everything on it. So Argo needed it back first.

"Sure," Asuna agreed, handing the crystal back.

Before saying anything more, Argo took the crystal and double-checked that the system considered the item as hers and that it couldn't be destroyed by someone else.

"Thanks!" Argo jovially expressed her gratitude. "Here, come closer, you're going to want to see this!"

The tone Argo used did not inspire Asuna with much confidence. All of a sudden, she started to feel a bit nervous.

"W-what is it?" Asuna asked, hoping she was just being overly-paranoid.

"It's a hidden camera."

"W-what?!"

Asuna immediately started panicking.

"Everything that you saw in the raid was recorded by this thing," Argo revealed. "The quality isn't so great, and there isn't any audio, but we can see everything that happened. In particular, I want to see this guy 'teleport' out of the room. Because he didn't, and so he had to have faked it somehow."

"Wait! Argo! There are things on there that I don't want anyone seeing―!"

"Really? What sorts of things? Now, I'm even more interested…"

"E-embarrassing things!"

"What could be embarrassing about taking part in a boss raid?"

"I…"

"You know there is crucial information on this thing, right?" Argo pointed out. "No other footage exists of this orange player and how he fights. It needs to be analyzed so that we can get a complete picture of what happened. I don't know if you know this or not, but you're the only person who knows what happened behind those closed doors. We need to see what's on here."

Asuna hated how much sense that made. There wasn't going to be a way for her to hide some of the more embarrassing things that had happened to her.

"C-can you delete certain sections?" Asuna asked, hoping the answer to be a resounding 'yes'.

"No," Argo crushed all her hopes. "I can't delete them, per-se, but I can move them onto this private crystal with those amazing pictures and rapid slideshows of you so that only I will ever see them. My private crystal. But _someone_ has to know, at least. Unless something truly humiliating happened. Did you strip naked for some reason?"

"N-no! It's nothing like that! It's just…"

"Just…?" Argo prompted.

Asuna sighed, before revealing what she had been worried about.

"S-stairs."

"Stairs?" Argo questioned.

Asuna nodded.

Argo chuckled.

"Yeah, I heard about that. Something about you being thrown down them, right?"

"H-how did you know?"

"Diabel might have mentioned it."

Diabel had relayed some of what had happened over a private message before Argo had made her way to the boss room. Asuna's plight, for one reason or another, had been included.

"He did?" Asuna asked.

"Yeah," Argo confirmed. "But plenty of other people saw it happen. If Diabel hadn't told me, someone else would have."

"It happened three times," Asuna clarified.

"Wait, really? He never mentioned that. How did that happen?"

"J-just… watch the video. But I want to make sure that nobody else ever sees it."

"Um, okay. But I think we'd need to make another deal for that."

"Seriously?! Another one?!"

"Come on, Asuna. You know I'm a cutthroat info-dealer, right? I can't turn that off."

"Okay… what do you want?"

"You remember that deal we made a few minutes ago? About me doing anything you want for that period of three hours?"

Asuna nodded.

Argo swiped her hand through the air and made a _whooshing_ sound with her mouth, as if she were cutting through something. It was an imitation of a sound you might hear in a martial arts, fighting movie, when the main character let's a punch fly.

"...Gone," Argo emphasized. "The deal I'm offering you is that our last deal is void. And in exchange, you can pick and choose the sections of this video that I don't share with other people. But I'm still going to watch the whole thing myself either way. Sound fair?"

Argo was completely willing to back down from this if Asuna said the magic phrase.

...However, she didn't.

Asuna sighed.

It felt like she could never win. Asuna always found herself on the losing end of these 'bargains'. She knew that she could probably end the discussion if she used that safe-word they had agreed on, but she really wanted to use that as sparingly as possible and let Argo be Argo.

Now that she thought about it, Asuna didn't really care about Argo constantly getting one over her in these 'deals'. The previous deal hadn't even meant that much and truthfully, Asuna wasn't even sure why she had accepted it. She wasn't the type of person to take pleasure in another's humiliation.

"O-okay," Asuna agreed.

"Perfect! Now come here! Let's watch!"

Argo wrapped her arm around Asuna's shoulder and pulled her closer as they leaned against the base of a tree. Then she went through her menu and pulled out a box full of snacks.

"Want some biscuits?" Argo asked. "Help yourself!"

"Where did you get these?"

"Just at the player market in Tolbana."

"They sell food there?"

"They do! They have lots of things! I'll take you there tomorrow if you'd like!"

"O-okay."

Asuna tried one.

"Oh, wow," she complimented. "These are pretty good!"

"Right?" Argo agreed. "Some people have focused on their Cooking skill and have levelled it up pretty high."

"Cooking skill?" Asuna asked, confused.

"You don't know?"

Asuna shook her head.

"Well, yeah. There's a Cooking skill. I don't know what else to say about it."

"And you can make these with it?"

"You can make almost any food item with it," Argo explained. "It's an extremely advanced system. Highly customizable. Why? Are you interested in maybe picking it up?"

"M-maybe."

It did actually interest her a little bit. Asuna really wanted to taste good food again.

"You could make a lot of money with that skill," Argo pointed out. "A lot of players miss real food, so there's a huge demand. But at the same time, not many players want to use up one of their early skill slots on something like that."

"Why?" Asuna questioned.

"It doesn't provide an obvious benefit to combat-oriented players. And that is enough for a lot of players to avoid it like the plague. Some dishes boost stats or HP, but potions serve the same role and are more portable. And unlike Blacksmithing, Cooking doesn't create anything practical in a fight. While entertaining, throwing pies around wouldn't do very much against a monster. So not many players pick it up, despite the large demand for good food."

"Do you think it's a waste of time?" Asuna asked.

Argo sighed.

"Sometimes, a single good meal is all it takes for someone to keep going. You could save a lot of lives indirectly like that. I've seen it happen."

' _So have I,'_ Asuna thought, remembering the cookies that the orange player had given her that one time.

"―But to be fair," Argo continued, "nobody has seen what the higher levels of Cooking offer in terms of new abilities. I think the highest level anyone has achieved in that skill so far is around 60. Sixty out of a thousand. So it's probably way too early to dismiss it as useless since so little is known about it. People are finding new things out about this game every day, so if you pick that skill up and max it out, you might just find something interesting at the end."

Argo finished setting up the video and then they both began watching it.

* * *

Argo was rolling on the ground, howling with laughter, sounding a bit like a dying animal.

A humiliated blush was displayed on Asuna's face.

"When you said you were thrown down the stairs I never imagined it was that far!" Argo cried between laboured breaths. "You went all the way down from the top!"

"Well, what did you think happened?!" Asuna shouted back in frustration. "That I went down two steps and called it a day?! Why do you think I didn't want anyone else to see this?!"

Argo couldn't respond because she was laughing too hard. She was completely incapacitated and couldn't summon the strength or the coordination to stand up.

"It wasn't that funny, Argo!"

"This footage is gold!" Argo wheezed. "He absolutely manhandled you! Like a bitch!"

"Thank you for reminding me!" Asuna shouted back sarcastically. "I never would have remembered otherwise!"

"To the very last step!"

"I know, okay?! I was there!"

"Oh my god! Steppy! I'm gonna pee myself!"

"Don't you start that, too, Argo! I've been called more than enough names for one day! My name is Asuna! Use it!"

"S-Steppy!"

"Asuna!"

"N-no… you d-don't understand! I didn't come up with that!"

"W-what?"

"I overheard someone else say that after the failed raid! I had no idea who they were talking about until now! They were talking about you!"

"What are you talking about?"

"A few hours ago, a bunch of people were laughing about that―talking about how 'Steppy' was thrown down the stairs! It was you! They were laughing at you! I thought it was someone else! You're not going to escape that name now! It's yours for life! They're spreading it around!"

Argo was in tears. She knew firsthand just how quickly stupid rumours and humiliating new names could spread throughout the population and enter common usage. She absolutely hated when it had happened to her, but she thought it was hilarious when she saw it happen to someone else.

Asuna's fists were clenched as she watched Argo continue to roll around on the ground in hysterics.

"Well, at least I didn't hit a fruit stand!" Asuna finally shot back, having had enough of Argo's behaviour. "What is it that they call you now?! Fruit Juice?! You're in no position to laugh at me, Fruit Juice! Your name is _way_ worse than mine!"

Asuna hated being called names. As a result, she wasn't one to do that to others under normal circumstances. But she wanted to hit Argo back for being teased, even if only in a small way.

Argo settled down into a chuckle and then finally, her laughter ceased.

"Y-you just called me Fruit Juice."

"You bet I did," Asuna confirmed. "And I'm going to keep calling you that from now on, Fruit Juice."

If Argo was going to call Asuna humiliating names, then Asuna was going to call Argo humiliating names right back.

"I'm so proud of you," Argo declared.

"...What?"

That had certainly not been the reaction that Asuna had been expecting.

"You finally did it."

"I finally did what?"

"You made fun of me."

"...So? You make fun of me all the time."

"You've never done that before, Steppy."

"Well, you've finally made me start, Fruit Juice. Happy?"

"Yeah."

"Y-you are? Why?"

"I've been trying to get you to stand up for yourself all this time. You finally did it. I feel like a mommy that's just watched her child walk for the first time. My heart fills with joy."

Asuna's expression dulled.

"You are such a weirdo sometimes," she said.

"Hey!" Argo objected. "I'll have you know I'm a weirdo all of the time, thank you very much! That's part of my identity! And you love it, Steppy. Now get back over here so we can finish the video. You were thrown down those stairs 3 times and I want to see it happen each and every one of them."

* * *

The two girls watched as Asuna climbed her way to the top of the stairs in the video, only to be immediately knocked right back down by a flying Diabel.

Once again, Argo lost it immediately. The instant Diabel had slammed the other girl back down the stairs, Argo started wheezing. She became completely incapable of speech.

"Why are you laughing?!" Asuna immediately made her irritation known. "This isn't funny!"

"That was _perfect_!" Argo cried. "The timing! You can't make shit like this up! You have to show this to everyone! You _have_ to!"

"No!" Asuna denied. "I'm not showing this to anyone else!"

"Aw~! Come on, please?" Argo begged.

"Chocolate Ramen."

"...Fine."

* * *

Argo whistled in amazement as she watched the part where Asuna started swinging the minion around over her head.

"Woah," Argo giggled. "That is so awesome."

"Hey!" Asuna exclaimed. "I-I don't remember this happening!"

"You mean to tell me that you were so mad that you blacked out during this and can't remember?"

"H-he's a really frustrating guy…!" Asuna defended.

"...You don't say," Argo laughed.

As they watched the orange player repeatedly punch Asuna in the nose, Argo could understand that sentiment perfectly. She would have been _furious_ if that had happened to her.

* * *

"No…" Argo trailed off, anticipating but not believing that she was correct about what was about to happen. "You didn't."

Asuna looked down at the ground, refusing to look at the video. It was not about to display one of her proudest moments.

Argo watched as the Asuna on-screen picked up Diabel and angrily hurled him down the stairs.

"You did!" Argo exclaimed, sounding thrilled. "You _actually_ did it!"

"I apologized to him afterwards and we're on good terms again now, Argo," Asuna quickly defended herself.

"Why are you talking as if you're ashamed of this?!" Argo asked. "This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen you do! Way to go, girl!"

"It's not something to be proud of, Argo! I was having a really rough day and Diabel had not made it any easier! It was a lapse in judgement!"

Argo just laughed, finding the situation absolutely hysterical.

Asuna had just been so angry at the time. It was like she was a completely different person in those moments. Part of her couldn't believe that she had done those things.

* * *

Asuna was extremely thankful that there was no audio in this recording.

"Oh, wow. Those stairs are long. We missed almost the whole fight because you were too busy going for a tumble," Argo said.

"I still can't believe he threw me down a second time like that. It was completely unnecessary."

"That's number 3, isn't it?"

"It is. But the second time he didn't pick me up and throw me. He launched Diabel. And Diabel hit me. It was less personal."

"It was pretty funny though."

"I didn't think so."

"The butt of the joke usually doesn't."

A moment of silence descended on the two for a few moments as they continued to watch the video.

"...Kinda hot too," Argo struck like a thunderbolt out of the blue.

"Mm." Asuna instantly nodded in agreement without really thinking.

It took her brain about 3 seconds to catch up with what she had just agreed to.

"Wait, what?!" she shouted, not quite sure that she heard that right. "What did you just say?!

Argo had been worried that Asuna was developing an immunity to her antics, so she was glad that this approach seemed to work.

She doubled down on it.

"I said it's kind of hot."

Asuna blushed.

"I h-heard you," she said. "I was asking about what you meant by that…?"

"What do you think I meant by that?" Argo asked. "Isn't it straightforward?"

Asuna's blush deepened.

"I can only think of one possible interpretation coming from you, but even to me, it sounds like a stretch…"

"That's because there is only one interpretation," Argo clarified. "What even is there to interpret? I assure you that what you think I meant is _exactly_ what I meant. I mean, what's not to like here? You being dragged out of that room by your hair, kicking and screaming and being smacked around like a cheap whore by a strong man like that?"

Argo shifted uncomfortably.

"Mm," she hummed. "That's just lovely. So hot. Don't you think so? That's what true romance is all about."

Asuna's face was beet red by the time Argo was finished.

' _How can anyone just go out and… say things like that?!'_

Argo was the biggest wildcard Asuna had ever seen. It was like nothing that she said could be predicted in advance. The craziest, most bizzare things Asuna had ever heard, came out of the whiskered girl's mouth, and they did so at random times. Often unprompted and out of the blue.

"W-what the hell are you talking about?!" Asuna balked.

"In every single one of my romance novels back at home, that's how it always starts…" Argo said, letting out a slightly perverted chuckle.

"W-what s-sort of novels are you reading?!"

"They're amazing," Argo replied. "That's all that needs to be said about them. Don't judge me."

"I'll absolutely judge you!" Asuna declared. "No wonder you don't know what actual romance is! Your mind has been poisoned by that…!"

"That… what?" Argo prompted after Asuna trailed off.

"...That filth!"

"Hey!" Argo objected. "They're not filth! You haven't even read them!"

"I don't need to!" Asuna pointed out. "Your description of them is more than enough for me to know! Real relationships don't begin with premeditated violence like how they apparently do in those books! That's just not how it happens in real life, okay?! That wouldn't be a great start to one!"

A _lot_ more could be said on the subject than that, in fact.

"It sure looks like that's how _your's_ is starting…" Argo spoke, deliberately implying many things that weren't true but that she knew would bother Asuna.

"I am not starting a relationship with anyone!" Asuna protested. "How many more times am I going to have to tell you that I don't have a crush for you to believe me?!"

"You don't?" Argo asked with false confusion. "I thought we agreed that was a lie."

"It was not a lie! And we didn't agree on anything! Why would I lie?!"

"You give off a lot of mixed signals. It's confusing me."

"You're just looking into it too deeply! I just want to be his friend!"

"Right. His friend. Do all your friends treat you like a cheap hooker? If so, I've been missing out."

"That's not what happened!"

"―Now if he were your boyfriend on the other hand, then it'd make a _lot_ more sense."

"How would that make _more_ sense?! That'd be _way_ worse! Boyfriends that do things like that to their girlfriends are horrible people! They aren't supposed to treat them that way!"

"...The best ones do."

Asuna gaped at her friend.

"That's _not_ the correct answer, Argo! That would be abuse!"

"Only in the real world where there's pain and permanent damage and, most of all, when it's not consensual."

"W-what?"

Asuna was so lost. This conversation had taken so many unexpected twists and turns that she didn't even know what hemisphere of the planet she was on anymore. Argo was twisting this conversation in every single direction that Asuna didn't want it to go.

"...Some girls like that sort of thing," Argo said.

"…Hah?"

"―But in real life, it can be difficult to explore those urges," Argo continued, seemingly completely seriously. "Because people can get hurt in real life. But in this world there are 4 things in place that change everything."

Argo began laying out her theory, enumerating her points on her fingers.

"First, there's no pain or permanent injuries. Everything heals within 30 minutes. That doesn't happen in real life so people have… more options."

Argo raised her second finger.

"Second, there's an anti-harassment code that allows any player to shut down any… unwanted advances. Immediately, and at any time."

Assaulting someone in a safezone could easily see you wind up in jail seconds later. All the victim had to do was press a button and it happened automatically. There were ways to carefully skirt around this system, but it required a level of subtlety that not many people had. And there were no exploits to completely circumvent it.

Asuna stared at Argo in stunned disbelief as the girl raised her third finger and pressed on.

"Third, that ethics mode toggle that I told you about that lets you do... certain things, cannot be toggled by anyone else other than you. No one can force you to do anything you don't want to, in other words. No matter how hard they try. The system stops it if you don't want it."

This particular rule applied even outside of safe zones. There was no way around it. You could attack other players, even kill them, but you could not… alter their state of dress. That just wasn't a thing. Anything rated 18+ could only happen consensually, and there were a whole slew of robust systems that enforced this.

Nobody cared if you murdered someone though.

"And fourth," Argo emphasized, " _these_ aren't our real bodies. Our real bodies are lying in hospital beds, fully clothed, in another world. So there aren't any… _consequences_ to whatever actions that we happen to partake in, in here. No matter how… exuberant."

It was a surprisingly well-thought-out series of mechanics that the developers had implemented. Why they had decided to put such things in a VRMMO was anyone's guess. But they had. Argo had tried imagining how the conversation between those developers had gone back when they were brainstorming these ideas, but she hadn't had much success.

' _Hello fellow game developers! Do you know what would make a great addition to our open world, VRMMORPG sword-based combat game designed for teenagers?! The ability to fuck each other! That won't cause any issues whatsoever! And it certainly won't end up as a gigantic PR disaster!'_

The alternative was that Akihiko Kayaba had coded the whole thing himself. But, if he had, just… why?

"Mix those 4 things together and what do you get?" Argo asked.

"I…"

"You get a perfect setup for a fun time," Argo answered her own question before Asuna could give a proper answer herself. "Our avatars are very… durable, if you catch my drift. Flexible too."

Argo left it at that for the time being and awaited Asuna's reply.

...It took several moments for her to give one.

"...Why, Argo?!" Asuna eventually shouted, her face flaming red. "Every single time we have a conversation, I think to myself... 'This is it. There is absolutely no way that she can possibly say anything crazier than this.' But then you always do! You always prove me wrong! Stop doing that! You have put _way_ too much thought into all of this!"

"You haven't put in enough thought," Argo countered. "A lot of people are thinking things and getting ideas. I'm not the only one. Things can get a lot more... _interesting_ in this place than they can out in the real world, let me tell you. So it's safe to... _experiment_ to your heart's content. Because when we wake up at the end of the game, it'll be like nothing ever happened. The slate gets wiped clean. So if you want your boyfriend to treat you a certain way in public… well. Who am I to say otherwise? It's safe. You can do certain things in this world that you just can't in the real world. It just requires a certain level of trust. What girl wouldn't want to get a little… _creative_? All of your wildest fantasies, even impossible ones to achieve in the real world can all come true in here."

Steam was practically pouring out of Asuna's ears at the image Argo was painting for her.

"I admire your courage, actually," Argo continued. "Doing those sorts of things so openly. We'll be in this world for years. Might as well make use of the mechanics while we're in here, right? I'm sure that's what you were thinking at the time. It's not like they were implemented by accident. The game developers very deliberately designed these rules. _They're_ the real perverts here, not I. I'm just a humble, forward-thinking opportunist, carefully examining the tools she's been given―"

"Oh, is that what you are?!" Asuna shouted, mortified. "I thought you were something else! My mistake!"

"―One who likes to think about certain things because others do not," Argo added.

"You're a shameless pervert!" Asuna declared. "This was well-established before, but now there's no question!"

"All of this is to say that I, for one, approve of the peculiar, violent nature of your relationship―and your submissive role within it―and the... _activities_ you get up to in public," Argo said. "I'm even a little jealous of it. So you don't have to be shy. The rules have changed in this amazing new world, so we must adapt with them. It's all about overcoming adversity―"

"Argo!" Asuna whined.

"What?"

"Is this all some elaborate ploy to tease me?! Because I can't tell anymore!"

"...You may take my words however you wish to."

"I don't want to take your words at all, thank you!"

"You can't silence the truth forever," Argo said. "One day, it'll catch up with you again and fuck your day up."

"Nothing that you've said on this matter is true in the slightest!" Asuna ranted. "None of what you just described is relevant because I don't have a crush on anyone! None of what you implied is happening between me and that player for the thousandth time! I was not taking advantage of the different rules in this virtual world to express my secret, hidden, perverted desires publicly as some sort of show of inner, feminine strength in the face of great resistance! I can't believe that was your interpretation of the situation!"

"...It was the best working theory I had."

"Try harder!"

"It's exactly what it looks like, though," Argo pointed out. "What other explanation is there? He just kicked the crap out of you and yet you're trying to get closer to him. Do you want me to rewind the video so we can watch it again?"

"No!"

"Well… too bad. Because I want to watch it again and it's my camera so that's what we're going to do."

Asuna groaned as Argo rewinded the footage.

"See?" Argo asked. "Only one conclusion can possibly be drawn from this."

They watched again as the orange player kicked the absolute crap out of Asuna's avatar and dragged her out of the boss room towards the door using her hair as a handle.

"It's young love, blossoming healthily," Argo concluded. "There's no mistaking it."

"Are you kidding me?!" Asuna objected. "That's not what's happening in that scene! We were having a fight!"

Argo shifted uncomfortably as she ignored Asuna's reply.

"It's just… wow. That's all I'm going to say. What a man. Right, Asuna? You sure know how to pick 'em."

Asuna glared at Argo, fully preparing to go on a massive tirade and series of denials before she finally noticed the subtle, smug look the other girl had on her face and stopped herself.

She was being teased again. Every single word she had heard in the past few minutes had been precisely calculated to embarrass her and make her freak out. It had all been an act designed to tease her.

Seeing Asuna slowly figuring everything out, Argo gave one last push.

"What about you?" she asked suggestively, with a wink and a little nudge with her elbow. "I can only imagine what that was like in-person. Did it… you know?"

Asuna blushed and got real quiet.

"...Turn you on?" Argo finished.

"Why do you always have to make everything weird and perverted like this?!"

"Why do dogs bark?" Argo replied. "It's just what I do, Steppy. It's my duty."

"Well, you should think about moving on from it!"

"I've thought about it. And I've concluded that it's a bad idea. If I stopped, then who would annoy you?"

"Nobody has to do that!"

"Nonsense. Someone absolutely has to do that. It's imperative. You―"

"The part you're looking for is coming up, Fruit Juice," Asuna interrupted, hoping to change the topic. "Don't you want to see it?"

"...Which part?"

"The part where we get locked inside the boss room."

"Alright, Steppy. I'll allow you to change the subject this time. But don't think I don't know what you're up to…"

* * *

"Woah. Brutal. Looks like he just tried to kill you," Argo said.

"...He really didn't want me in there."

"I can see that, jeez."

Argo then watched as Asuna threw her teleport crystal to the side as Illfang slammed his axe down upon her. Argo's lighthearted, joking mood shattered into pieces in that moment.

"What the fuck?!" she shouted.

Argo glared at Asuna.

"You just threw your life away!"

"I did not!" Asuna countered. "I knew that he was going to step in and save me!"

"Asuna... that was stupid."

"Well, it worked, didn't it?!"

"Did it? It looks like in the end he's still inside that room and you're not."

"Oh yeah? Well… shut up."

"...An elegant rebuttal. Truly remarkable. Perhaps the best of all time. Nobody has ever rebutted a point more thoroughly than that. You should be proud."

"I never would have learned about his plan or anything about the boss if I hadn't done that!"

"While that is true, please don't do something like that again. I swear, you're such a hypocrite sometimes. You get all lecture-y whenever you see me or someone else doing something reckless, but then when you do something crazy like this yourself then it's 'the only choice I had!' or some bullshit like that. You know I'm going to remember this next time right? Next time, whenever I do something that you don't approve of… I don't want to hear a word out of you. If you can't follow your own advice then why should anyone else?"

"Fine!" Asuna conceded. "Point taken! I'll try to keep it in mind next time."

Argo smiled.

"Aw~!" she cooed. "All is forgiven! I love you, Steppy."

Argo hugged her.

"S-shut up! You're being weird again!"

* * *

"What is that?" Argo asked as she saw the orange player pull out a strange item on the video.

"A rock," Asuna replied, sounding irritated.

"...That's clearly not a rock," Argo replied.

"Right?!" Asuna agreed. "That's what I kept telling him! But no matter what I said, that's what he kept giving me as his answer!"

"I mean, he's clearly doing something with it," Argo explained.

"Don't go there Argo," Asuna warned. "I've had my patience tested more times inside that room then in the entire rest of my life combined. He knew how much I hated it when he acted deliberately stupid, so, naturally, he made it his goal to do that as much as humanly possible. Every question I asked, he gave me a stupid, wise-ass remark in response that didn't answer anything and he spent the whole time acting like a child!"

A 5-year old could tell that that item was not a simple rock. But despite this, the orange player had continued peddling that as an explanation as if Asuna was a braindead buffoon without a single shred of common sense.

It made her furious just thinking about it!

"That sounds really annoying," Argo replied, sympathizing with her friend's plight.

"I can feel another headache coming, just thinking about it," Asuna continued. "Now if you don't mind, Argo, let's steer the conversation in a different direction. I don't want to talk about how angry he made me. I have some very choice words to say about how he treated me in there that I never got a chance to say to him. I'm nowhere close to being done ranting about it."

Asuna wanted to become that player's friend more than anything. But she also wanted to chew him out for a good 2 or 3 hours for acting like such an insufferable jerk to her. She felt that she was owed that at the very least. She definitely wanted to hear an apology or two from him, too.

"...Fair enough," Argo relented. "I think I know what that is, though."

"What?" Asuna asked. "The rock?"

"Yeah. He asked you for the necklace I gave you and you can see him doing something with it. If I were to take a guess, I'd say he knew it was a camera and he stole all the footage on it."

"Wait… he knew about that?" Asuna asked. "How?"

"I do that quite often, so it isn't really too much of a surprise. Hiding cameras in things. There are also a couple of known items out there that can copy over footage like this. I'm guessing that 'rock' is one of them."

"When I asked him what he was doing with that necklace after he was done with it and gave it back to me, he told me he was just 'admiring the craftsmanship'."

Argo immediately broke down into hysterics. She started bawling from laughing so hard.

"That isn't funny either, Fruit Juice!" Asuna shouted.

Argo's laugh could be so annoying, especially when Asuna knew that it was directed at her. She prayed to every deity in the sky that Argo would never meet this orange player. They had the same sense of twisted humour and Asuna could already imagine how horrible it would be for her blood pressure if the two of them ganged up on her. One was bad enough.

"That's genius!" Argo replied. "You must have hated that!"

"You have no idea! I hated all his answers! It was just one after another with him! Bullshit reply after bullshit reply on every single topic that ever came up. He knew I hated it!"

"And yet, you're still determined to take his side," Argo pointed out.

With how much Asuna complained about him, you'd think she'd hate his guts and want nothing to do with him. Somehow, the absolute polar opposite is what was happening. Asuna wanted to be at his side at all times.

"Because I know it was all an act!" Asuna exclaimed. "He isn't actually like that! He just wanted me to leave him alone. So he made every effort to be as annoying as possible. But whenever he dropped the act… he was actually pretty nice."

Asuna sighed wistfully, remembering those few, rare occasions where the orange player had acted like a reasonable human being. She treasured those moments.

"He has all of this footage then," Argo concluded. "A copy of it, anyway. He was probably checking to see if I had anything incriminating on it."

Asuna blinked.

"So you mean to tell me that he knew about the fact that you were secretly recording everything I was doing all this time and decided not to tell me about it? Why would he do that?"

That didn't make any sense to her.

"Does that bother you?" Argo asked.

"Yeah."

"...Then I suspect there's your answer."

Asuna closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and screamed internally.

"You mean he..." Asuna trailed off dangerously.

"Yeah."

"...We're going to have a _lengthy_ discussion, him and I. Next time I find him."

* * *

"Here it is, Argo," Asuna warned. "It's about to happen."

"Illfang's attack?"

"Yeah. It came out of nowhere. That player and I were just talking when suddenly he froze for, like, a minute and a half. Then, without telling me anything he just walked out into the open only to get hit by it."

Just as Asuna finished explaining it, Illfang's mysterious attack played out on the video they were watching. The camera had had a perfect view of it as it went down.

Argo's eyes widened.

"See?" Asuna said. "He was right."

Argo gulped.

"That was the single most terrifying thing I have ever seen in this game," she admitted.

That wasn't an exaggeration at all. Argo had never seen anything like that before. One moment Illfang had been perfectly stationary, and the next, he had launched a world-ending attack at the orange player.

"R-really?" Asuna asked.

She didn't have a lot of experience with things like this, so she didn't really know what was considered crazy and what wasn't in this game. She had to use Argo for that as her guide. If Argo was confused and scared after seeing something like this, then Asuna was, too.

"Bosses shouldn't be capable of anything like that," Argo elaborated.

"So what do we―?" Asuna began before being interrupted by what happened next on the video.

Illfang suddenly started launching his attack over and over again, back-to-back.

"What the hell?!" Argo shouted.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that part," Asuna explained. "Illfang didn't stop after just one swing. He just went crazy after this. He doesn't stop for quite some time."

They watched as the orange player weaved through all the attacks and eventually dragged Asuna to the back of the room.

Argo was speechless.

"Argo…?" Asuna asked, worried after she went silent. "Are you okay?"

"I'm…" Argo began, not sure what to say for a moment. "Illfang didn't do anything like that during the raid, right?"

"No," Asuna confirmed. "He didn't. Do you know why he's doing that?"

"I don't. But _he_ does. Mr. Mysterious."

"He figured it out? How can you tell?"

"Oh, he knew alright. Probably figured the whole thing out right before walking out there. He knew _exactly_ what he was doing. He deliberately left his back exposed and spun around at the perfect moment, catching that minion on his shield. The timing behind that was too precise to be random. He knew. Without a doubt."

Argo even rewinded the video they were watching a few times to double check.

"...So he wasn't acting like a reckless idiot?" Asuna asked.

"Oh, no, he definitely was. Just because he knew what he was doing doesn't mean it wasn't unbelievably moronic. If he was any less skilled, he'd have been killed. If I ever saw you trying to do something like that I'd chain your ass to the wall in my room."

"Uh… thanks?"

"...I mean that in a good way, of course."

"Right. Of course."

Asuna struggled to determine how that could be interpreted in a good way.

"...I totally mean it though," Argo continued. "Don't be stupid and try something like that. I will chain you up, no joke."

She absolutely would. Argo didn't want to see her friend kill herself due to her own stupidity.

"...I wasn't going to," Asuna defended.

"You see… you say that, but seeing some of the other stuff you got up to on your little adventure with this player makes it hard for me to believe you."

"I get it, Argo! Can we move on?!"

"Okay, Steppy. We can move on. But don't forget about it or it will happen to you. I have the chains and everything ready to go at a moment's notice and I've been looking for a new way to use them. Don't test me."

"Why do you carry around chains with you?" Asuna couldn't help but ask.

"Why don't you carry around chains with you?" Argo asked in return.

"Nobody needs chains in their day-to-day life!"

"I do."

"Why?!"

"Do you really want to know? If so then I'll be happy to share―"

"I changed my mind," Asuna immediately back-pedalled. "I don't want to know after all."

* * *

"That's pretty much the end," Asuna said after she and the orange player sat down and started a prolonged conversation on the video that couldn't be heard. "We just sit there and talk for the rest of the time."

"When does he teleport?" Argo asked.

"Right," Asuna replied, partially forgetting why they had been watching this video in the first place. "We talk for a while yet. Probably another 10 or 20 minutes. Just fast-forward through it since you can't hear anything anyway."

"I am so regretting not putting a better crystal in this thing," Argo grumbled. "I had no idea that something like this was going to happen. Next time the quality is going to be a lot better."

There was absolutely going to be a next time, too. This orange player was the most dangerous, and the most interesting thing that she had stumbled upon in this game so far. Argo had to know more about him.

"Why did you even put a camera in that necklace?" Asuna asked.

"It was a habit I got used to back in the beta," Argo explained. "Sometimes, people like to buy videos like this to see certain players in action or to analyze the tactics used in a battle to find any strategic mistakes that originally went unnoticed. It helps a lot during the post-raid analysis. It lets you see what can be improved. However, when it's so early on in the game like this, making devices like these is extremely expensive and requires a ton of people to work together. And since this was pretty much just a side project of mine, I didn't see any value in splurging too much to get a reasonable quality device. I'm trying to save up for something else and I couldn't afford anything luxurious."

"You could have told me about it…" Asuna complained.

"If I had, you would have acted differently."

"Maybe," Asuna agreed. "But I still stand by that it was an incredibly manipulative thing to do to me."

Argo sighed.

"Yeah, you're probably right," she admitted. "And I'm sorry for doing that to you, Asuna. I won't do it again."

"...Really?" Asuna asked, a bit shocked at the honesty in the other girl's tone.

"Yeah," Argo confirmed. "Really, really."

Something had changed between them now. They were… closer, for lack of a better word. Before this evening, some small part of Argo had still thought of Asuna as a guinea pig to be used as she saw fit, so it had been easy to convince herself that it was okay to manipulate her like this. But Argo just couldn't see things that way anymore.

She'd absolutely continue manipulating everyone else in the game, but Asuna had ascended above that level and was off-limits now. As a result, Argo promised herself that she would share any plans she had with the other girl that directly involved her from now on.

"Okay, Argo. I accept your apology." Asuna graciously admitted.

It made Argo feel a bit guilty, actually. In her opinion, she had been let off the hook way too quickly and easily. Asuna was too much of an angel for her own good.

' _She's too pure for this world,'_ Argo thought to herself.

"...The deal's back on," Argo said, unable to overcome that sense of guilt.

"What deal?"

"The one I cancelled. It's back on. Three hours. Order me to do whatever you want."

Argo felt that Asuna was owed that much at least. She felt a bit like a dirtbag for even trying to cancel it on her. Asuna deserved the opportunity to get some revenge.

"But what about the sections of this video I don't want you to share?"

That had been what the deal had been about, after all.

"I still won't do it. Take your pick."

"...Thank you, Argo."

"A lot of this footage won't even help, anyway," Argo justified her decision. "Whether it's shown or not. The quality just isn't that great."

If it had been more concrete, things might have been different, but it just didn't matter that much. It wouldn't make the job of convincing all the other players that this orange player was just misunderstood much easier.

"It's a shame, isn't it?" Asuna asked.

"It really is," Argo agreed. "But I can tell you this. With a player like this on the loose, I'm not going to be making that mistake again. What I wouldn't give to see the footage on that rock of his."

"You think that thing was a camera too?" Asuna questioned.

"It was," Argo confirmed, almost certain about it. "You could see him place it earlier on in this video in a good spot to get a good view of everything. It's probably a rare drop or a quest reward. And I have no doubt that it beats the hell out of my camera in every aspect. If you ever happen to see him again, I definitely want you to try and convince him to share what's on it."

"What do you mean 'if' I see him again?" Asuna protested. "I'm definitely going to see him again. I haven't finished giving him a piece of my mind, yet."

"...It's going to be a lot tougher than you might think," Argo pointed out.

"What do you mean?"

"This guy is really good at hiding. And people like that can disappear for long periods of time if they really set their mind to it. Our best bet is to catch him right when the battle with Illfang concludes and the door opens. If we can rush inside before he gets too far away, then we might catch up."

"Is there any way to get through his disappearing trick?" Asuna asked.

"You'll need the Searching skill for that," Argo explained.

"...Well it looks like that's going to be my next pick, then."

"I like the way you think. Do what you can to max it out as fast as possible. It's the only way you'll ever find him again."

"Right."

* * *

Asuna looked up at Argo, blushed, then looked back at the video that was still playing. Then she looked back up… then back down again.

This section of the video had reminded her about something.

Argo raised her brow.

"Something on my face?" she asked.

"N-no. Nothing like that," Asuna denied.

She had actually hoped that Argo wouldn't notice her uncertainty.

"Well then spit it out, girl!" Argo exclaimed. "What's up?"

"Forget it," Asuna back-tracked, trying to get the other girl to ignore her. "It's stupid."

"No, no, you can't do that! It's too late! Argo wants to know, now!"

"I said forget it!"

"It is burned into my memory forever and will never be forgot," Argo explained. "I will hound you about this for the rest of time unless you spill it!"

Asuna remained silent.

"...Remember the phrase?" Argo reminded the other girl. "If you're worried I'll tease you, then say it. I have an off-switch, you know?"

Asuna still refused to speak up, hoping that the other girl would move on. She knew that it was way too late for that, but she still tried, hoping for the best.

"Asuna, if you don't tell me what's bugging you, I will go out of my way to start digging into your affairs," Argo threatened. "Do you really want me to start throwing some weight around? I've been told that I'm quite good at that. I _will_ find out what's bothering you with or without your cooperation."

Argo didn't like when her friends hid their pain from her. If they had a problem, even if that problem was with her, she wanted to know. Kirito's leaving had been the last straw in that regard. If only she had known about it, things might have gone differently.

It wasn't going to happen again.

"...Let it go, okay?" Asuna tried.

It was such a Kirito response. It made Argo furious. She was not going to let this go.

"So you have chosen death," Argo started ranting. "You just smacked a beehive. You have stepped into an ankle-deep puddle of shit and you don't have the shoes for it. You have no idea the magnitude of shitstorm that I'm going to cook up for you now."

Asuna's eyes widened at the unexpected hostility.

"You think you can get away with prompting a conversation like this and then tucking it away in the corner again before it goes anywhere?" Argo asked. "Cute."

She glared straight into Asuna's eyes.

"I'll have you know that there are dozens of top-of-the-line black-op spies on my friend list that are at my beck and call," Argo continued ranting. "With naught but a twitch of my fingers I can mobilize an army of top-quality assassins to make the life of whoever I choose an absolute hell from which they will never wake. And every single one of them will be pointed at you. And like a swarm of furious hornets they will come down on you like nothing you've ever seen. They will do things to you that have never been done before. If only you could have known in advance the terrors that would be brought down upon you in the wake of this terrible injustice―"

"Alright, alright, already!" Asuna interrupted, finally relenting. "I get it! Shut up already!"

Argo's irritation immediately cleared up as if it was never there.

"...A wise choice," Argo said. "Now tell me."

"I'm telling you, it's dumb," Asuna replied.

"No it's not," Argo denied.

"You don't even know what it is yet," Asuna pointed out.

"Every last thought that forms in that sexy brain of yours is worth the light of day. Even if it is dumb, I'm your friend and want to know."

Asuna blushed.

"F-fine."

"Spill."

"Okay… I was just going to ask you a question."

It was an embarrassing question that Asuna had wanted to ask the other girl, but not enough to get over her embarrassment for having to ask it.

"...What question?" Argo asked.

Asuna looked hesitant and vulnerable and ended up only mumbling it.

"Louder please," Argo requested. "I didn't catch that."

Asuna mumbled her question again. Too quiet to be audible.

"Speak up, girl!" Argo shouted.

"Fine!" Asuna yielded. "I was going to ask you what colour my hair is!"

It had been bothering her a lot ever since she had spoken to that orange player about it.

"...What?" Argo asked, surprised at the innocuous question.

"What colour is my hair, Argo?! Happy, now?! That's what I was going to ask you!"

The info-dealer had finally ground it out of her with her constant pestering.

"...Is that all?" Argo asked. "Why are you so worked up about that?"

"...My eyes too," Asuna added. "I want to know what colour you think they are."

Argo, seeing Asuna's state, decided not to tease her about these questions. For some reason, Asuna looked extremely self-conscious about this. Argo had no idea why this was, but this matter seemed to be incredibly serious, so Argo treated it as such. The way she saw it, if she wanted her friends to open up to her, then she needed to prove that they could come to her for anything. Even seemingly pointless things like this.

Asuna turned away shyly, part of her dreading the answer she would be given.

"Look at me, please," Argo said. "I can't see your eyes."

Asuna turned and Argo placed both of her hands on Asuna's cheeks before staring deeply into the other girl's eyes.

Asuna's whole face turned red.

"W-what are you doing?!"

"They look brown to me," Argo replied before releasing the other girl's head from her grip.

"...Really?" Asuna asked, a bit hopeful. "They're not orange?"

Argo looked back at Asuna before tilting her head in consideration.

"Well, I guess there is a speckle or two of orange in there, but―"

"No!" Asuna could not accept this. "They're absolutely _not_ orange!"

"Woah, woah! Calm down! What's wrong with having a little bit of orange in your features?"

"That player…"

Argo understood immediately why Asuna was making such a big deal out of this.

"I see. He must have given you shit about it, huh?"

That was such a dick move to do to a girl.

"He called me a clown," Asuna recalled. "My hair, anyway. It's 'orange like a clown', he said. My eyes too. Then he called me a freak. It's been bugging me ever since."

"You are a freak, Asuna," Argo confirmed. "But not in the way you're thinking. Don't think of it as an insult. You have a really rare hair colour that I've never seen before and it's amazing."

"That's not how he meant it…" Asuna grumbled.

"It doesn't matter how he meant it," Argo replied. "He was just giving you shit for absolutely everything he could think of. He attacked everything about you hoping that you'd go away if he did. Didn't you say that it was all an act and that he was actually kinda nice whenever he dropped it?"

That was what Asuna had explained to her earlier, anyway.

"I… guess."

Asuna didn't sound too convinced.

"For the record, I think you have beautiful hair, Asuna. Eyes too. They're like a hazel or a chestnut brown. I'll bet he thinks so, too."

"...And chestnut brown is definitely a real colour!" Asuna piped up.

"Of course it is," Argo immediately agreed. "What? He told you it's not? Don't listen to him. He's just giving you a hard time. Your hair is a long way off from being bright orange like a clown's. But even if you did have bright, neon orange hair, I think you'd rock that look."

"Do you really think so?" Asuna asked, sounding hopeful.

"Of course I think so! You're gorgeous, girl!" Argo encouraged. "And actually, now that we've brought it up, you should try that. You should try dying your hair that colour just to check."

"Neon orange?" Asuna asked with a disbelieving look. "Why?"

"Because he gave you shit about it!" Argo answered. "It's a power move! Next time you see him, you should have that exact hair colour he was teasing you about and you should be wearing it proudly."

Asuna gave her a strange look.

"Look," Argo continued, "dying your hair in this world is a lot different than dying your hair in the real world. It just takes a couple of clicks here and it's easily reversible. It isn't a multi-hour procedure that takes up a ton of time and it doesn't cause any damage to the hair follicles themselves. Those don't exist because everything is virtual, including your hair. So, you could dye it, take a quick look in the mirror, and reverse the change instantly if you don't like it. Within seconds. Come on! I'll take you there tomorrow and we'll try!"

"I don't know…" Asuna sounded unconvinced.

"I'll dye mine if you dye yours," Argo suggested.

"I like your hair Argo," Asuna admitted. "You don't have to do that."

"Eh, it's alright, I guess," Argo allowed. "I've been thinking about changing it, though."

"Why?"

"Because I've―"

Argo cut herself off and carefully considered whether or not she should give the other girl an honest answer.

' _I guess since she's been so forthcoming, I should return the favour,'_ Argo thought.

"―recently come to learn that it's the same colour as a banana," Argo finished with a wince.

Asuna's eyes widened.

"Don't tell me…"

"Yeah," Argo confirmed. "You aren't the only one who gets shit about her hair colour. Fruit Juice looks like a fruit, and needs to be reminded every hour on the hour about it."

This one asshole in particular kept on coming around to remind her about it.

"I'm sorry," Asuna apologized. "I didn't know."

"Nah. It doesn't really bother me all that much."

This was a _huge_ lie, but it was something she was trying to aspire to. Argo didn't want something this silly to bother her, so she figured that if she pretended that it didn't for long enough, then one day it might actually come true.

"On the contrary," Argo continued, "I think I'm actually going to lean into it a bit. Make my hair a really whacky colour like purple, or electric blue… or maybe even a kiwi-green. Something that _really_ looks like a fruit, you know? The way I see it, if you can do the very thing that people make fun of you for and still keep your head up high, proud, then at the end of the day, you won."

It was a lot easier to say something like that than to actually apply the advice, though.

Asuna's eyes lit up at this.

"That sounds…"

"...Amazing?" Argo finished the other girl's sentence. "I know, right? I am very wise. The wisest, some say. I get stopped in the street all the time and people tell me. 'You're so wise!'. But you can tell me this also. I know that I'm the coolest, but it doesn't hurt to remind me again. What's true is true, after all…"

Asuna stared at Argo with dull eyes upon hearing this.

"...You get less awesome when you brag about it yourself, Fruit Juice."

"Hey! That's rude!"

Argo hadn't expected someone like Asuna to get so familiar with using a name like that on someone.

"But okay," Asuna agreed. "Let's do it. We can always change it back, anyway, right?"

She really liked the idea, actually. She had become convinced.

"Easily," Argo confirmed. "It doesn't even cost that much to do, either. It takes, like, 60 seconds to make the amount of cor required killing kobolds. We'll go right after the meeting tomorrow."

"Meeting?"Asuna asked. "What meeting?"

' _That's right. I never actually outright told her about it yet,'_ Argo thought.

"There's a meeting tomorrow to discuss everything that happened with that orange player and to come up with a plan going into the future," Argo explained. "Do you mind coming with me to it to explain your side of things? Right now, only the two of us know what really happened."

"Of course," Asuna immediately agreed. "What do you think is going to happen there?"

"The usual stuff. You'll probably need to tell that story you told me earlier once again and convince everyone that Mr. Mysterious isn't actually a bad guy."

"He isn't."

"While you and I might know that, the other player's don't. All they know is that they all collectively got their asses kicked by an anonymous player with an orange cursor. Some of them are very angry about that, you know, so you'll have your work cut out for you."

"I'll do my best."

She actually would. This opportunity was perfect for her. Asuna had wanted to talk to everyone about what had happened, anyway. Mostly to tell them all not to go after that player.

"That's all anyone can ask," Argo replied. "Just know that that player's reputation and what it will become is entirely in your hands. Criminal? Or just a weird, mysterious guy that likes to keep to himself? A lot of people already formed their opinions about that and they are scared. You'll have to change some minds."

"I have no doubt that after I show them all this video and tell them what happened they'll make the right choice."

Asuna believed in the rationality of the other players and knew that they would make the right choice.

"I hope you're right about that…"

Argo, on the other hand, wasn't so sure.

* * *

"Here it is," Asuna mentioned when the video finally progressed to the moment in question. "He's about to teleport."

"Perfect. Let's take a look."

"I can't believe him," Asuna complained. "He made me think that I finally convinced him to come back with me. But it was all a lie. Boldly told straight to my face."

The two of them watched as the player pulled out his teleport crystal and… teleported.

"Wait… hold on. What?" Argo asked, stunned at the sight.

"What's wrong?"

Argo rewinded the video and played it again.

"...He just teleported," she declared.

"What?" Asuna replied. "Didn't you say that he faked it?"

"I thought he did!"

"So you mean he really left the room?" Asuna asked.

"Either he has created the most convincing fake teleportation ever in the history of the game, or he genuinely left the room for real," Argo summed up.

Those were the only two possibilities she could think of.

"But someone is still inside there, right?" Asuna pointed out. "The doors still won't open?"

Didn't that mean the orange player _had_ to be in there?

"...Are you sure that the two of you were the only players inside?" Argo asked.

If another player had been inside the room, then that would explain everything.

"Of course," Asuna answered.

" _How_ sure are you?" Argo pressed.

"What do you mean?"

"How do you know that there wasn't a third player in there, using a broken Hide ability just like Mr. Mysterious?"

"...Do you really think something like that might have happened?"

"It would definitely explain everything. Because I can't see anything weird about that teleportation."

Argo had expected that the player had done a simple trick with his Hide ability to trick the girl into thinking he left the room. But that couldn't be the case because teleport crystals, when they were activated, could not be stopped. The instant the teleport animation had begun, the outcome was inevitable. The player had to have left. He just had to.

"But he wasn't at the teleport gate when I showed up there," Asuna pointed out. "Where would he be right now if he actually left?"

"I don't know," Argo replied. "But… I'm going to take this video with me and ask around. If that was faked and he's still in there somehow, then I have no idea how he pulled it off. But maybe someone else knows."

Argo could freely admit that she was not omniscient. She wouldn't admit that to anyone else out loud, but she knew it deep inside. There were things about this game that she did not know.

"Do you have any ideas?" Argo asked.

"If I did, I wouldn't have been fooled by it," Asuna pointed out.

"...I guess that's a fair point."

"The boss doors are still locked right?" Asuna asked.

"Yeah," Argo confirmed. "I have people watching the door. They'll let me know when it opens. If whoever is in there teleports out, the doors will open. If they kill Illfang, the doors will open. And if they die in there, the doors will open. The only possible way in which those doors can remain closed is if the battle is still in progress. So if that player left, then that means that there has to be someone else in there. There has to be. It really looks like that player teleported. But I don't know for sure. I can't figure it out right now, I'll need some more time to think."

The two of them fell into a contemplative silence as they each tried to solve the riddle.

"And I mean, it makes sense, right?" Argo asked.

"What does?"

"He told you that he was only in there to find out about Illfang's attack, right? He did that. So why would he stay inside?"

The player could have lied, maybe, but to what end?

"...To finish off the boss?" Asuna suggested.

"I guess that is a possibility," Argo allowed. "The Last Attack bonus is a thing, after all. But is that really all there is to it? While the Last Attack bonus is pretty good, it isn't phenomenal. Would he really go through the trouble of locking everyone outside just so he could make sure he got it?"

It didn't fully convince her.

"I don't know," Asuna admitted.

"Neither do I."

"...It sounds like something he'd do just to piss people off, though," Asuna muttered with an irritated scowl.

With how much he had put her through, she could see that as a possibility.

"I guess," Argo chuckled. "But right now, I think that the most likely scenario is that he really teleported out of the room and that there is a third player inside there. That orange player clearly teleported. The animation played and everything. You could even see him crush the crystal."

"He called it out, too," Asuna added, as that piece of information was not evident on the silent video. "He shouted 'teleport', just like you're supposed to."

"Then there you have it," Argo concluded. "What else could have possibly happened?"

"...So he left after all then?" Asuna wondered aloud.

"He did. Sorry. It looks like he just abandoned you out here."

Asuna didn't reply, but it appeared as though that possibility greatly saddened her.

Argo felt bad for her.

"Come on, let's get out of here," Argo said, wanting to cheer the other girl up. "I don't know about you but I'm starting to get tired. Cold, too."

"You can go then, Argo," Asuna replied. "You don't have to stay out here with me."

"You're staying here?" Argo asked, in total disbelief.

"Mm," Asuna hummed in response.

"Why?"

Argo looked at Asuna as if she were an alien.

"You said that he teleported from the room right?" Asuna asked. "He still might come."

Argo couldn't believe it. She dropped her jaw at how delusional the other girl was being.

"He's not coming!" Argo yelled. "It's been hours! How long did he say he'd be?!"

"...Thirty minutes," Asuna reluctantly admitted, knowing that it sounded bad.

"It's been over 5 hours!"

"Well… maybe something happened," Asune suggested. "Do you think he's okay? What if he was ambushed or something? I'm starting to get worried."

Argo could tell that Asuna really was getting worried. It wasn't an act. She really seemed to believe these nonsense excuses she was spouting.

"...Oh my god. Will you marry me?" Argo couldn't help but ask.

Asuna blinked. Then, when her brain caught up to what she had just been asked, her eyes shot wide open.

"What?!"

"I wish someone like you was my wife," Argo grumbled. "That would be awesome. You're like the perfect woman. I mean look at you. All concerned for his well being even though he hung you out to dry like the old rug my cat pissed on. It's as if he can do no wrong in your eyes. I want someone like you to look at me like that."

"You don't know that that's what he did!" Asuna objected. "And he can do plenty of things wrong! Believe me! I'm well aware!"

Asuna had not forgotten how angry the player had made her. But that did not prevent her from feeling worried about him. She was also well aware that Argo was probably right and that he had probably left her out here, but she still wanted to wait a little bit longer just in case.

"Fine, then. I guess we'll just wait out here then," Argo said, sitting back down.

"You don't have to stay, Argo."

"I'm not leaving you out here alone," Argo declared, sitting back down. "We'll wait for as long as you need. I want to meet this guy too, you know."

The two of them fell into a silence that lasted several minutes before Asuna finally broke it.

"Fine… we'll give it 10 more minutes."

"Sounds good to me."

* * *

**Inside the boss room**

How dumb did that girl think he was?

Kirito was almost insulted. There was no way that he was ever going to fall for that girl's obvious trap. He couldn't believe that she thought he would.

That girl had tried to play off that she had some weird, wholesome obsession with him and wanted to be his friend more than anything. That had been the full extent of her plan. And the entire time, Kirito had been thinking, in total disbelief: ' _Really? That's the story you're running with?'._ He had been utterly baffled about how simple-minded and idiotic that approach was. If she had actually wanted him to leave with her then she would have needed to try much harder than that.

Nobody liked Kirito and he knew it. He was unlikeable. He didn't even like himself. So all of that girl's flowery, friendship speeches had gone straight in one ear and right out the other. He just didn't care. The words were totally empty, meaningless, and nobody in real life truly believed in any of it.

To be fair, the old Kirito might have fallen for it. He might have actually gone with her in the hopes that she was actually telling the truth. Working together as a team and becoming friends would have sounded awesome to him. Because the old Kirito was lonely. The new one was too, but at least he had gotten used to it by now and knew that it was never going to change.

But wasn't that every guy's dream? Who wouldn't have fallen for a nasty trick like that? A beautiful girl practically falling over herself just trying to be your friend? That was a dangerous card to play and a lot of people would have fallen for it hoping beyond hope that it might actually be true.

Kirito had been so naive back then. But now he understood that reality didn't work that way. That girl, Asuna, in reality, was a vicious manipulator with a ton of experience in toying with the emotions of others.

It had been the biggest trap that Kirito had ever seen. Her plan was so obvious. She wanted to get him outside the room, lure him somewhere with all of her glittering, angelic promises so that he could be ambushed and captured like a rat in a trap.

Well it didn't work. And in the end, Kirito had exploited that girl's own devious, scheming machinations to get what he wanted instead. He won that game. Not her.

Throughout that entire conversation, Kirito had played along. He had planned it all out in advance. He hadn't known the details of every last thing he was going to say right from the start, but he had planned out the general direction that he was going to steer the conversation.

At the beginning, he needed to be strongly against everything she said, no matter what it was. And then throughout the conversation, his plan had been to slowly thaw out and sound more and more convinced by her scheming ways to make her think he was falling for it.

He had to be careful, after all. He couldn't just immediately agree to leave with her. That would have looked suspicious to someone as shrewd as her and would have triggered alarm bells in her head. It'd seem too easy. So instead, he needed to fight her every step of the way and only give up small amounts of ground at a time, making her work hard for every inch. That would make her believe that he was slowly becoming ensnared by her sickly, sweet words. But in reality, it was setting Kirito up for his own plan's execution.

To be fair, that girl did bring up some interesting points that Kirito had needed to refute to convince himself that he was doing the right thing in openly going against the rest of the players like this.

Asuna was right in that he might be delaying the end of the game by slowing everyone down, but that couldn't actually be measured in any concrete way. It was just speculation. In fact, he could just as easily be doing the opposite. By slowing all the players down by delaying their victory against Illfang, he could be preventing the early deaths of a lot of players.

Some players might have died if they had won the fight today and rushed onto floor two into the unknown. But they were alive now. And they were all forced to remain on the mostly cleared out first floor where it was way less dangerous. These people would spend the next several days, or perhaps weeks there, slowly gaining strength, and that would inevitably lead them to being stronger than normal when they finally did get to floor 2. They would be better prepared when they do and that could mean that less overall players would die. That would, counterintuitively, mean that by being delayed, they would actually reach floor 3 and beyond faster than normal.

It was like a fire drill, what Kirito had just put them through. Everything for all the players in the raid party had just gone horribly wrong all at once. People who thought they were strong, were proven not to be under Kirito's swords. The whole party had been placed in a position in which they could have genuinely been wiped out. If Kirito had been a genuine PKer with truly malicious intentions, he could have easily killed them all.

But the situation had been totally benign at the end of the day. Kirito didn't have malicious intent. Everyone walked away safely, terrified, but alive. They had all been faced with their mortality for potentially the first time in a controlled way rather than being forced to confront it when the stakes were actually real.

As a result, next time, they would be far more prepared. Players would now keep the idea in the back of their mind that they might have to fight against other players in the future. They would begin training for that, and many people would get a lot stronger than they would have otherwise

But… at the same time, maybe not.

And that was the point. This hypothetical scenario he had just outlined was just as speculative as the one Asuna had provided. Kirito didn't know what was going to happen in the future. So Asuna's argument claiming that he was going to cost more lives by doing this or that wasn't convincing in his opinion. Because she didn't know that. She couldn't know that. It was just something that she felt was true for some reason.

Kirito, on the other hand, didn't. He agreed that it was a plausible narrative that might happen, but it was far from obvious. There were plenty of other possibilities. But at the end of the day, Kirito knew that the only way any of these decisions would be proven to be the correct one is in hindsight. He would have to first observe the ripples that his actions caused before being able to determine whether it ultimately ended up as the right move or not.

Until then, it was just opinion. Ask ten people about it and you'd get ten different answers. This was Kirito's. Faced with such uncertainty, Kirito had determined that the only move he could make was forging on ahead.

He didn't care if the unity of the other players shattered, either. They had plenty of time to work out their issues with each other and fix that. On top of that, the longer they took, the further ahead Kirito would be able to get from them, so he actually saw that as a good thing.

There was also another potential benefit he could think of. Now that he had become public enemy number one, who would be talking about beta testers anymore? Kirito might have just single-handedly stopped that witch hunt by pulling all the hate onto himself.

In summary, he had been unconvinced by Asuna's argument for why he should have gone back with her and how doing that was the best thing to do. But at the same time, he had pretended to be shaken by the possibility, which encouraged that girl into thinking that her trap was working.

Then, at the end of their conversation, by pretending to finally fall for her scheme after a hard fought battle, Kirito had been able to convincingly fake his teleportation and expel the girl from the room. She hadn't even tried to check if he was still inside after he 'vanished'. She had simply been so excited at the prospect of finally duping him, that she had tried to follow after him immediately.

If you asked him, that girl deserved exactly what she got. Because nobody in real life acts the way she tried to pretend. Her plan was stupid and she needed to learn that there were people out there who wouldn't be fooled so easily. It was dangerous and a massive dick move to try and play with people's feelings like that.

It was as if she had gone through every anime ever created, and tried to fuse together all the 'best girl' traits of every popular heroine and act out that role. That, combined with her...uncomfortably attractive appearance made her deadly. Like a siren, luring sailors to their end.

She was an utter witch, cackling away on the inside. That was Asuna's true nature. Insidious, sly, deceitful, and conniving. A liar.

...But it wasn't enough to fool him. He had seen right through it. Straight to her blackened core. Kirito had no doubt in his mind that the girl was probably throwing a massive temper tantrum wherever she was right now after figuring out what had happened. That she had been duped and that her target had escaped right out from under her bloody claws. She had to be furious and that made Kirito smile.

She wouldn't be trapping anyone today. Kirito hadn't bought any of that crap that she had been spouting. Not a single word of it.

As for how he had actually managed to fake his teleportation, the idea was rather simple. He had been inspired by his previous work in teleport animation manipulation back when he was disguising the use of his Ring of Acid when he was escaping from the player market in Tolbana. Back when he was running his 'shop'.

It was all misdirection and sleight of hand. A magic trick, preying on a person's unconscious tendency to assume that things are as they seem and that there is no trickery at play.

When a player activates a teleport crystal, the action is irreversible. You can't activate one and then decide that, actually, you don't want to teleport halfway through the process. It's a one and done deal that can't be stopped. The game would force you to complete the action.

Kirito's Ring of Acid was different, though. It had a drawback. Well, it had what was _supposed_ to be a drawback, anyway. Kirito had figured out how to use it to his advantage in this case. It differed from a teleport crystal in the sense that it's animation could be cancelled. That was the whole point of it. The ring was supposed to be hard to use in a combat situation, so it was designed to cancel the animation if the player moved or did anything significant during it. To make using it harder in an emergency.

But this could be exploited.

It meant that if Kirito happened to use his Ring of Acid to teleport instead of a teleport crystal, then at the very last moment, in the last couple of frames before teleporting, as his avatar was fully engulfed in the blue particles of the teleport animation, Kirito could stop the process. Simply moving around would be enough to do that, but in this case, Kirito had stopped it by activating Hide.

That was the difference. If he had used a teleport crystal instead, his menu and all of his abilities would have been disabled during the process and this idea wouldn't have worked. Only with an item like his ring could this happen. With it, he could cancel the animation and make it so that he wouldn't teleport, while simultaneously making it look like he did.

It was a nearly perfect trick. It was common knowledge that teleport animations couldn't be stopped halfway through. People didn't even talk about it. It was just a phenomenon of the world that was observed all the time. If you saw a teleport animation surrounding a player, there's no way they won't teleport. It just wouldn't occur as an option in people's minds that someone might find a way to do that. Because they can't.

But Kirito could. He had activated his ring discreetly while he had been talking to the girl. Then he had waited the system imposed, few-minute delay, and then at the last moment he activated Hide, vanishing from the room.

But he had still been there. Invisible.

There was one final part to the trick that he had thrown in just for good measure. A final bit of misdirection to further enhance the effect.

Since he still had a few teleport crystals on him, he had made use of one. He had held it in his hand and crushed it. However, his intention in doing this had not been to activate it.

Ordinarily, to activate a teleport crystal you needed to give it a voice command, and then it would shatter and teleport the player. But Kirito had destroyed his crystal by crushing it in his hand, depleting its item durability down to 0. _That's_ why it shattered, not because it had activated and was triggering the effect. He broke the thing. When that happened, it shattered into polygons just like any other broken item. But that created a nearly identical visual effect to what it would have looked like had he actually activated it and used it as intended.

This further enhanced the illusion, making it look like he had gone through all the motions.

In fact, Kirito couldn't think of a single way in which someone might have noticed the ruse. It was too ironclad. He had timed it all out too perfectly.

He had even shouted 'teleport' right before shattering his crystal. But this, again, due to careful planning, had not triggered the effect to activate. In order for a teleport crystal to actually activate, on top of the voice command, you needed to give it that same mental 'nudge' that all other item hotkeys required. Kirito simply hadn't done that. So the system had not activated the item.

You needed that mental nudge to tell the game that you actually wanted to teleport. Otherwise, if it were to activate solely off of a voice command, it might go off accidentally if you happened to be in a conversation with someone and the word 'teleport' happened to come up.

Similarly, you couldn't just give the crystal this mental nudge alone with no voice command. You needed both.

Failing to give the system this mental 'nudge' was impossible to detect from another player. So it wasn't a tell. The only possible way in which a truly expert-level observer might have noticed the ruse is if they happened to notice Kirito's vice grip on his teleport crystal intensifying at the last moment causing it to break. When a teleport crystal activated as intended, it shattered automatically, so the player wouldn't have to break it themselves like this.

But this was such a subtle action. Even if someone knew exactly what to look for, and knew all about Kirito's Ring of Acid, they still probably would have been fooled.

It was bulletproof, as far as he could tell. A perfect escape plan executed flawlessly.

...But at the same time, Kirito was a paranoid guy. Extremely so. And ever since he had decided to never lose at anything ever again, he had decided that he would not leave anything up to chance when he could otherwise avoid doing so.

After he had 'vanished' and Asuna had left the room, Kirito had not deactivated Hide to reappear. He remained hidden and silent.

A small part of him had always known that there was still a possibility, tiny as it may be, of a third player being in the room and Hiding exactly as Kirito was, right at that moment. They could have easily been watching him.

Maybe they had snuck through the door when Kirito had been fighting the players outside. And now this hidden player―or players if there was more than one―could be trying to take advantage of all of Kirito's hard work in clearing out the boss room so that they can solo the boss in Kirito's stead. All they would need is for him to leave.

Kirito's fake teleportation was not only meant to convince Asuna that he had left the room. It was also meant to convince any hidden players. Because then maybe they would reveal themselves, thinking that they were alone.

Kirito was trying to bait them out. The problem was, he didn't know how long it would take for that to happen. If Kirito had been this mysterious, invisible, third player, he would have waited too, after all. To see if he was _really_ alone. But Kirito didn't have the Searching skill to test this idea.

So he waited. And waited. And waited. Just in case that tiny probability ended up being correct after all. He wanted these people, if they existed, to reveal themselves first so Kirito could come up with a plan to deal with them.

Kirito waited hours to see if anyone else would suddenly appear in the room. Because maybe they were just as determined and just as paranoid as Kirito himself. So it was a battle of wills to see who would deactivate their Hide ability first.

Kirito had no intentions of losing. So he didn't deactivate his ability. At all. The moment Asuna had left the room, Kirito had called it a day. He had no intentions of revealing himself to the world for the rest of the evening. He would not make a single sound all throughout that time either in case someone might be listening. He would remain hidden, inside the boss room, until the following morning before he'd even think about doing anything else. He was not about to lose after coming so far due to making a stupid, avoidable mistake like that.

Nobody had shown up so far, but it had only been 5 hours. Nowhere near enough time for Kirito to be confident in his solitude.

He had no reason to come out of hiding, anyway. Illfang was still damaged from all the battling throughout the day. So, if Kirito finished it off while it's HP was less than 100% like this, all the experience would still be split between all the other players that had taken part in the raid. The system would calculate that all those other players had still technically contributed and would reward them for doing so. Kirito wouldn't get all the xp if that happened.

All the other players would also receive a popup the instant Illfang died as well, describing how much xp they got and congratulating them. That would warn them the instant the boss was defeated and would tell them that the doors were about to open. Then they'd easily be able to prepare an ambush for him.

So Kirito had no choice but to wait until Illfang fully regenerated. Because once that happened, and Illfang was back at 100%, the boss would reset. Only when this happened could Kirito kill it safely without having the xp be split. He would get it all and his level would skyrocket.

Kirito knew that he was going to be waiting for a while. The boss's passive regeneration would slowly refill it's HP, but it'd take hours for that to happen.

The problem he needed to solve now was how he was going to sleep safely in the boss room. He was not coming out of the cover of his camoflauge any time soon. But at the same time, sleeping in a boss room was dangerous and it didn't take an expert to figure out why that might be.

Even though Kirito's Hide ability was so overpowered that neither Illfang nor his minions even knew he was inside still, going to sleep would cut him off from all sensory information. If he were attacked while he was unconscious, either by a monster, or by that hidden third player, there would be nothing he could do.

All of the protections he had set up by his cave to ensure he could sleep safely without being interrupted in the middle of the night―the creation of a proximity alarm by using his tents and those pieces of fabric―wouldn't work here. Kirito couldn't hide those items with his camouflage because they were too large and noticeable. So he would have to come up with another idea.

The mysterious third player would have to do the same thing.

* * *

**AN: Have a Nice Day!**

**Improvements:**

**Black Silverclaw, Myrek, _Sigravig_, Haley Dill, Visionist**


End file.
